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Reading for World Mental Health Day 2022

This World Mental Health Day (October 10), the message is simple: ‘Look after your mental health, Australia.’

Belonging plays an important role in supporting good mental health, and one way to find community and feel less alone is to read narratives that let you feel understood.⁠ To this end, we have six book recommendations to share that bravely and powerfully explore different elements of mental health.

Ill Feelings by Alice Hattrick is a work of narrative nonfiction that blends memoir, medical history, biography, and literary nonfiction. Suffused with rag, it explores life with a medically unexplained illness, drawing on figures including Virgina Woolf, Emily Dickinson, and Florence Nightingale.  

Fever is Jonathan Bazzi’s multi award–winning debut, translated from Italian by Alice Whitmore. Following the aftermath of Jonathan’s journey coming to terms with his HIV-positive diagnosis, this book is a searing examination of class, poverty, prejudice, and opportunity in modern Europe. 

So Sad Today is a collection of personal essays by Melissa Broder. What started as an anonymous Twitter feed, this collection is radical in its treatment of anxiety, depression, illness, and instability, its inventive imagery, and its deadpan humour. 

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone takes you behind the scenes of a therapist’s practise, as author and therapist Lori Gottlieb takes you with her to explore the inner chambers of her patients’ mysterious inner lives. 

Judith Hoare’s The Woman Who Cracked the Anxiety Code tells the remarkable story of Claire Weekes, the woman who pioneered an anxiety treatment that is now at the cutting edge of psychotherapies, putting the power back in the hands of the individual. 

Things That Helped is a series of essays by Jessica Friedmann navigating her journey through post-partum depression after the birth of her son, charting her return into the world. 

When selecting reading material, please remember to look after yourself first and be mindful of subject matter that may be triggering for you.

Ill Feelings

A radical, defiant debut from a bold new voice in narrative nonfiction.

In 1995, Alice’s mother collapsed with pneumonia. She never fully recovered and was eventually diagnosed with ME, or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Then Alice got ill. Their symptoms mirrored their mother’s and appeared to have no physical cause; they received the same diagnosis a few years later. Ill Feelings blends memoir, medical history, biography, and literary nonfiction to uncover both of their case histories, and branches out into the records of ill health that women have written about in diaries and letters. Their cast of…

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Fever

A multi-award winning Italian debut, from a bold new voice in contemporary queer literature.

Jonathan is 31 years old, living in Milan with his boyfriend of three years and their two Devon Rex cats when, on a day like any other, he gets a fever. But unlike most, this fever doesn’t go away; it's constant, low-level, and exhausting. After spending weeks Googling his symptoms and documenting his illness, he finally sees a doctor. A series of blood tests, anxious visits to hospitals, and repeated misdiagnoses ensue, until his doctor suggests an HIV test, and the truth is finally revealed: Jonathan is…

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So Sad Today

So sad today? Many are. Melissa Broder is too. How and why did she get to be so sad? And should she stay sad?

She asks herself these questions over and over here, turning them into a darkly mesmerising and strangely uplifting reading experience through coruscating honesty and a total lack of self-deceit.

Sexually confused, a recovering addict, suffering from an eating disorder and marked by one very strange sex fetish: Broder's life is full of extremes. But from her days working for a Tantric nonprofit in San Francisco to caring for a severely ill husband, there's no subject that Broder is afraid to write…

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Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

A TIME magazine Must-Read Book of the Year

Ever wonder what your therapist is thinking? Now you can find out, as therapist and New York Times bestselling author Lori Gottlieb takes us behind the scenes of her practice — where her patients are looking for answers (and so is she).

When a personal crisis causes her world to come crashing down, Lori Gottlieb — an experienced therapist with a thriving practice in Los Angeles — is suddenly adrift. Enter Wendell, himself a veteran therapist with an unconventional style, whose sessions with Gottlieb will prove transformative for her.

As Gottlieb explores the…

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The Woman Who Cracked the Anxiety Code

The true story of the little-known mental-health pioneer who revolutionised how we see the defining problem of our era: anxiety.

Panic, depression, sorrow, guilt, disgrace, obsession, sleeplessness, low confidence, loneliness, agoraphobia … Dr Claire Weekes knew how to treat them, but was dismissed as underqualified and overly populist by the psychiatric establishment. In a radical move, she had gone directly to the people. Her international bestseller Self Help for Your Nerves, first published in 1962 and still in print, helped tens of millions of people to overcome all of these, and continues to do…

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Things That Helped

Through the tide of hormones surging within my body, and the little runnels of blood, and the sour tang of my breasts, I lay awake, listening, and thinking of breath and of water. I had broken my relationship with sleep.

In this stunning collection, Jessica Friedmann navigates her journey through postpartum depression after the birth of her son. Drawing on critical theory, popular culture, and personal experience, her wide-ranging essays touch on class, race, gender, and sexuality, as well as motherhood, creativity, and mental illness.

Occasionally confronting, but always powerfully moving and beautifully…

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Ill Feelings

Alice Hattrick

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Fever

Jonathan Bazzi

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So Sad Today

Melissa Broder

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Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

Lori Gottlieb

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The Woman Who Cracked the Anxiety Code

Judith Hoare

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Things That Helped

Jessica Friedmann

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