May is Mental Health Awareness Month—the perfect time to explore books that support your well-being. Check out these inspiring nonfiction picks to help you recharge, reflect, and take care of yourself.
A woman diagnosed with bipolar disorder shares how she learned to reconcile the stigma that her devout Christian fundamentalist community attached to her diagnosis and how she was able to overcome it to find the help she needed.
But What Will People Say? by Sahaj Kaur Kohli
A writer, therapist and founder of Brown Girl Therapy, a wellness organization for adult children of immigrants challenges the long-held, Eurocentric mental health models that were focused on individuality instead of collective healing and offers an alternative.
In this beautiful memoir and work of stellar investigative journalism, the author, diagnosed with 6 different types of mental illness over 25 years, discusses how this impacted her life, while providing an engaging history of punctuation to show how, like pathology, punctuation orders and categorizes.
Project UnLonely by Jeremy Novel
Loneliness assumes many forms, from enduring physical isolation to feeling rejected because of difference, and it can have devastating consequences for our physical and mental health. As the founder of Project UnLonely, Jeremy Nobel unpacks our personal and national experiences of loneliness to discover its roots and to show how we can take steps to find comfort and connection.
I Want to Die but I Still Want to Eat Tteokbokki by Baek Sehee
In this eagerly anticipated sequel to the internationally best-selling South Korean therapy memoir, the author’s sessions intensify as her inner conflicts become more complex and challenging, sharing revelatory insights that come just when she has almost given up hope.
Above the Noise by DeMar DeRozan
From one of the most outspoken and respected NBA athletes comes a groundbreaking and remarkable memoir chronicling a very public struggle with depression, in the hopes that other young men will not suffer alone.
Men Have Called Her Crazy by Anna Marie Tendler
Recounting her experience in a psychiatric hospital as well as pivotal moments in her life that preceded and followed, a popular artist, in this stunning literary self-portrait, examines the unreasonable expectations and pressures women face in the 21st century as well as the insidious ways men impact their lives.
The Gloomy Girl Variety Show by Freda Epum
Traces a first-generation Nigerian American’s search for home and belonging on her own terms. Freda Epum meditates on the cost of living and enduring as a Black disabled woman in America and examines her journey through healthcare and housing systems via a pop cultural lens: our collective obsession with HGTV’s home buying and makeover shows,
After leading the National Institute of Mental Health, Dr. Thomas Insel realized America’s mental health system fails to deliver real care. In Healing, he explores how true recovery depends not just on medicine, but on people, place, and purpose—and offers a new path forward for families and the system alike.
