14 Books To Read To Support Your Mental Health Journey
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As we continue to destigmatize mental health and dive deeper into the healing individually and as a collective, we may find ourselves looking for more language for what we are experiencing. Social media can be a really valuable way to gain that language, but reading mental health books can give us a more in-depth lens to a the topics we might be seeking out. These books also allow us to really sit with that language in a way social media doesn’t always allow.
Books also offer the nuance that is needed when digging into healing trauma and managing any daily stress or anxiety. Here are 14 books to help you get started or continue your journey on the path to healing trauma and learning more about yourself, and will hopefully make you feel less alone in it all.
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14 Books To Read to Support Your Mental Health Journey
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Getting to Center
Marlee Grace
This approachable book offers accessible language around care, compassion, and aligns our lives with our values. She covers topics like money, imposter syndrome, creativity, divorce, queerness, sobriety, and more. This book is simply a must-read.
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Pleasure Activism
Adrienne Marie Brown
In a world that is often dominated my fear and anxiety, Brown introduces us to the radical act of “pleasure activism.” This book helps us reclaim the parts of ourselves and our relationships that are pleasurable, desirable, and joyful. This book also emphasizes the interconnectedness of this work and how, in order to make systemic change, we have to come at it together with pleasure and rest in mind.
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Empowered Boundaries
Cristien Storm
This book gives so much language around how to set boundaries, the importance of boundaries, and how we can take those boundaries into our communities to make them more resilient and, as the back of the book states, create “stronger emotional toolboxes.” This book breaks down what a boundary is, how to draw it, the challenges that came come up, and how we can apply these ideas to create a culture of safety and belonging.
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The Politics of Trauma
Staci K. Haines
This book acknowledges that trauma, while it can very much be individual, it is also political. Haines talks about healing and social change through the lens of somatics, which is a field within bodywork and movement. This book can helps us consider the way that society impacts our trauma and how that trauma affects our bodies. This book is a must-read for anyone wanting a deeply intersectional approach to healing.
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Self-Compassion
Kristin Neff
Neff reminds us that we are our biggest critics, and so much healing can be done when we begin to shift the personal narrative. Neff gives practical and real-world examples on how self-compassion can be one tool to bring us back into connection with ourselves and the people we love.
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My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies
Resmaa Menakem
Therapist, Resmaa Menakem, examines the way that racism is damaging in America and discusses this through body-centered psychology. This book asks us to recognize that racism is not only about the head, but about the body. It introduces us to an alternative of what we can do to grow beyond the racialized divide and white supremacy and acknowledges the trauma that this divide inflicts.
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The Empathy Exams
Leslie Jamison
While this is a memoir-style book of essays, it can help us consider the way empathy plays a role in our relationships and in our society. Jamison offers journalistic writing paired with her deeply personal narratives that remind us that we are a part of a collective and that we each have a role in taking care of each other, as well as ourselves.
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Odes to Lithium
Shira Erlichman
This book of poetry shares narratives of lived experiences about living with bipolar, taking medication, and being hospitalized. These poems find humor and tenderness among some of the harder parts of living with a mental illness while queer and invites us to approach those parts of ourselves with love and compassion.
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The Collected Schizophrenias
Esme Weijun Wang
This book of essays is a deeply illuminating book about the lived experience of someone who has schizophrenia and chronic illness. Wang writes urgently about the highly stigmatized disorder, her experience with us, and offers us impactful insight about institutionalization, PTSD, and more. This book is moving and helps shed light on how people with mental illness are in relationship with themselves and how it affects the world around them.
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Beyond Survival
Edited by Ejeris Dixon & Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
While this book is explicitly about mental health, this book offers lived experience and real-world narratives about reimagining justice and thinking through how we navigate conflict with an anti-racist lens. This book is about transformative justice, which “seeks to solve the problem of violence at the grassroots level, without relying on punishment, incarceration, or policing.” These are things that greatly impact the mental health of many. Reading this book is a wonderful way to begin to reimagine what conflict resolution and harm reduction can look like.
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It Didn’t Start With You
Mark Wolynn
Wolynn’s writing illuminates the way trauma is carried down throughout families and offers many tools to help us break the cycle so that we can create better conditions for the present and future.
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Permission to Feel
Marc Bracket
Focusing primarily on cultivating emotional intelligence between a parent and child, Bracket’s work is valuable for everyone who wants to be reminded that feelings are not “good” or “bad,” they just are. He reminds us that to feel our emotions is an extremely valuable thing, does not make us weak, and in fact, can make us more successful in all parts of life.
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Daring Greatly
Brené Brown
We’ve all likely heard the word vulnerability and have flinched away out of discomfort. Brown’s book reminds us that leaning into vulnerability is a powerful tool for change and connection. This book is also powerful for parents who are learning how to navigate being compassionate and patient. Overall, this book is approachable and will leave you wanting to read all of Brené’s books.
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Getting Control: Overcoming Your Obsessions and Compulsions
Lee Baer
If you are a person who has OCD or if you love someone with OCD, this book can help you gain language around what support can look like for this often misunderstood mental health disorder. Whether you experience intrusive thoughts, compulsions, or other obsessive behaviors, this book can be a tool in your toolbox towards recovery.
These books about mental health and more are not a substitute for therapy, but can be helpful tools for gaining language and can help on the tumultuous path that can be healing and reconnecting with ourselves and our communities.
To find care and/or access therapy and other mental health services and resources, visit:
Database for Abolishion-Centered Care Providers
or these no-cost peer support options
For crisis resources, please contact: