Hello Everyone!
May is Mental Health Awareness Month! I'm pleased to be able to feature some books, topics, and publishers that I feel are meaningful. Books of all sorts are supportive of my own well-being, but for this month, I am excited to select books whose purpose--expressed in a number of different ways--is to invite us to know ourselves better.
Some of these books are challenging, but I believe there is an underlying hope that allows their diverse topics and methods to cohere. Together they suggest that it is worth getting to know ourselves and the people around us well.
This collection includes a generous number of books by the publisher New Harbinger, which I first discovered and read in our used collection. I found them substantive on communication, depression, and anxiety. New Harbinger broadly publishes books on evidence-based techniques for psychological well-being. I find that, for me, their books exist in an accessible and respectful nexus between what practitioners might expect and what we the patients and thinkers ourselves find useful.
We've included here some classic self-help titles that people request at Roundabout all the time, such as Getting the Love You Want, by Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt and Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg.
We've included some books that are not of a how-to sort, but rather biographical or storytelling books that help us consider and empathize with others and ourselves. I'm especially excited myself to read Marsha Linehan's Building a Life Worth Living. I have found just her short descriptions on her website of the development of Dialectical Behavioral Therapy DBT to be compelling and interesting. We have Temple Grandin's Visual Thinking--she is another author who is requested her all the time--making me feel that there is a sense of interest and openness to neurodiversity and ways of thinking in our zeitgeist.
We also included books that consider the psychological experience of race, thinking of the wholeness of this experience. And, we included Lee Zimmerman's title Trauma and the Discourse of Climate Change. Both internalized racism and climate despair are topics that therapists themselves have reported to me that they are finding salient in their work with patients.
Therefore, these are living ideas. Books sparkle with the power of their ideas anyway, but these arrested me when I saw them together. I feel proud to have them all shown together and I hope they speak to you, too!
Raymond
