4 Books, 4 Doors: Recommended Reading List For Books About Mental Health
Reading empowers me to steer the conspicuous dissensions of my emotional health without blaming me for their existence or questioning the changing wavelengths of a mind’s multiplicities. A book is the quickest way to time-travel, to explore unknown worlds or return to old ones with new eyes. To further my discussion, I wanted to expand the note on reading and list 4 books that have been rather significant in my own personal journey of working my way through ongoing psychological disturbances as well as handling that of my clients in therapy and counselling.
Spoiler Alerts have been declared!
1. “The Empathy Exams” — Leslie Jamison
In “The Empathy Exams”, writer Leslie Jamison makes what initially sounds like a rather recherché
declaration — “Empathy is always perched precariously between gift and invasion.” I have shuttled between those polarities in my experiences both as a psychologist and a patient/client periodically. In the recent weeks, this statement has acted in the capacity of a grappling iron for conversations with a client who has lived with pervasive depression for many years. In sessions, she frequently questioned the legitimacy of empathy as well as the plausible space for shared vulnerability. I recommended this book to her as part of the therapeutic process after sending her some passages over email to which she responded with interest. The week after she started reading it, she sent me a photograph of this highlighted text — “Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us — a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain — it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves.” She added — This is the part that had been baffling me for so long; the ability to trust someone when they extended themselves towards me. This also takes me back to a spot where I feel like everything isn’t just happening to me but that I have power to direct its flow as well. Jamison’s book is a tessellated jasper of sorts urging you to hold it up to light as it refuses to conform to known pattern, revealing shapes within shapes. It moves beyond the idea of being a medical memoir even though its origin is her dealing with a niche physical condition — supraventricular tachycardia — which essentially makes her heart possess the ability to send out extra signals even when it doesn’t need to along with the accompanying welter in emotional and mental wellness. The chapters segue her unique job as a stand-in “pretend” patient for medical students to imprisoned populations, defending sugar, pain counts of extreme endurance races among many other seemingly discrete themes that are all connected by the singularity of pain; rather how we perceive & receive someone’s pain. These essays are alveolate yet piquant; narratives expanding on poly-limbed ascensions. Jamison explores simultaneously a universal translation of empathy while unfolding tinier meanings out of personal trials with tentative & reflexive intimacies.
2. “Mrs. Dalloway” — Virginia Woolf
In Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” there exists a line that has always attended to me when own depressive phases are synchronous — “First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.” Recently as I took a walk through an explosion of common bluebells in the English countryside charting the one route towards and out of a somewhat unpronounceable village, the body of a collapsed raven held me stationary in my path. Mrs Dalloway has always been that raven for me– the dark-bodied call for stopping and remembering. Woolf, as has been frequently documented, struggled with her own mental illness and eventually succumbed to it. I use the word succumbed with some hesitation because I do not want to concede to the stigma of how we respond to folks on the depression spectrum. The novel, written in a stream of consciousness format, tries to capture a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway who is essentially planning to host a party. There is a smattering of flashbacks and the tone of writing makes smoke of defined lines in storytelling. There is this shine of keen wit that compares Shakespearean sonnets to keyholes and men to cauliflowers. There is an inventoried Wrenching. The book presents through one of its two main narrators–a shell-shocked war veteran (in contemporary verbiage, a soldier fighting ptsd)–a deep critique of how mental illness was (mis)treated and spoken about. There is unmasking of bipolar/manic-depressive spectrum as well as even a possible reference to schizophrenic hallucinations. This work treads with strength into territories of sexuality, feminism, suicidal ideation, existential alienation among others without pandering or appeasing for the sake of an easy audience. Despite its many shadows, this line is a breath of light — “Absorbing, mysterious, of infinite richness, this life.”
3. “Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence — From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror” — Judith Lewis Herman
This book has been a guiding ship for me both professionally and personally. As a survivor of child abuse as well as intimate partner violence, complexities of shame & guilt that caused me to keel over frequently in the aftermath of acute ptsd found critical clarity when I finished this remarkable exposition of the eco-psychological minefield on which trauma survivors often walk. Dr. Hermann is responsible for some of the more ground-breaking research & discourse in understanding the involute and stratified nature of acute, long-term trauma which continues to be ignored by the DSM. Her work has been foundational in recognizing and naming complex trauma/s while mapping a blueprint for healing needed by a survivor. I have referenced her in my therapy sessions and a lot of my clients have found in her words a bridge to relief from pent-up, self-directed and inexplicable feelings of violence after surviving assault and/or abuse. She posits– “The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.”
This is significant recognition for our own geography of survival and the emerging antitheses that sometimes dissuade us from speaking up against the violences directed towards us.
4. “Power, Interest, and Psychology” — David Smail
Dr Smail was an English psychiatrist who was feverishly opposed to rigid institutional psychiatry and its unreliable assumption that mental illness is an individual, piecemeal problem as opposed to being the outcome of certain substratal relationships between socio-economic, cultural and ecological variables. He was a proponent of the socio-materialistic ideology in mental health and frequently questioned the vesting of power in prominent structures within dominant sections of societies that caused people to experience psychological & emotional conflicts. Central to this book is the idea that any attempts towards a hollow culture of pop psychology positivity is oblique in its slant if it doesn’t take into account the inequitable distribution of social power and resources. At the root of Smail’s approach is the simple idea that we should allow ourselves to be more caring towards each other as opposed to labeling each other. A community-oriented and trauma-aware approach to mental wellness can be the plinth on which we build a truly enduring capacity for compassionate wellness.
Those of us for whom books are equally medicinal as supernal– a chant practiced in the closed room of a praying mouth, there still exists a vast, slow-revealing universe we can swim through if we truly keep the company of the words that promise to honour our weird, our wonky while still keeping us afloat. To borrow from Barthes — “I can surmount, without liquidating; what I have affirmed a first time, I can once again affirm”.
Scherezade Siobhan is a psychologist, writer and a community catalyst who founded and runs The Talking Compass — a therapeutic space dedicated to providing mental counseling services and decolonizing mental health care. She is an award-winning author and poet whose work is published or forthocming in Medium, Berfrois, Feministing, SPR, Jubilat, DATABLEED, Nat Brut, Winter Tangerine, Cordite among others. She is the author of “Bone Tongue” (Thought Catalog Books, 2015), “Father, Husband” (Salopress, 2016) and “The Blues Kali” (Forthcoming, Lithic Press). Find her @zaharaesque on twitter. Send her chocolate and puppies — nihilistwaffles@gmail.com. Tweet at her @zaharaesque.
