10 Books With Powerful Mental Health Narratives
This is our tribute to all the brave, brilliant and courageous authors that are changing the narratives and stigmas around mental health disorders. Their books allow us to step into another’s mind and understand experiences that may reflect what we’ve been through, or be completely alien to us, acting as an empathetic educational experience.
Whether it’s to get you through the hardest of times, or to help you understand the people going through those times, these are the books tackling mental health in profound ways.
Sorrow and Bliss, Meg Mason
Everyone tells Martha Friel she is clever and beautiful, a brilliant writer who has been loved every day of her adult life by one man, her husband Patrick. A gift, her mother once said, not everybody gets.
So why is everything broken? Why is Martha - on the edge of 40 - friendless, practically jobless and so often sad? And why did Patrick decide to leave? Maybe she is just too sensitive, someone who finds it harder to be alive than most people. Or maybe - as she has long believed - there is something wrong with her. Something that broke when a little bomb went off in her brain, at 17, and left her changed in a way that no doctor or therapist has ever been able to explain.
This novel made us feel so many things. It’s funny, endearing, terrifying, shocking, and just so, so human. Hats off to Meg Mason for doing such a brilliant job at breaking a stigma and lack of knowledge around a certain mental health disorder (read the book to find out more).
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, Gail Honeyman
Eleanor Oliphant has learned how to survive - but not how to live. She leads a simple life. She wears the same clothes to work every day, eats the same meal deal for lunch every day and buys the same two bottles of vodka to drink every weekend. Eleanor Oliphant is happy. Nothing is missing from her carefully timetabled life. Except, sometimes, everything.
One simple act of kindness is about to shatter the walls Eleanor has built around herself.
Now she must learn how to navigate the world that everyone else seems to take for granted - whilst searching for the courage to face the dark corners she's avoided all her life.
Change can be good. Change can be bad. But surely any change is better than... fine?
A brilliantly idiosyncratic character study and unravelling of buried trauma, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine is about loneliness, human connection, and redefining ‘normal’. It urges everyone to be kinder, because you never know what another person has been through.
Reasons to Stay Alive, Matt Haig
What does it mean to feel truly alive?
Aged 24, Matt Haig's world caved in. He could see no way to go on living.
This is the true story of how he came through crisis, triumphed over an illness that almost destroyed him and learned to live again. A moving, funny and joyous exploration of how to live better, love better and feel more alive, Reasons to Stay Alive is more than a memoir. It is a book about making the most of your time on earth.
A deeply personal and authentic story of depression and anxiety, Matt Haig’s memoir is a testament to the human soul and spirit, to glimmers of light amongst weighty darkness. Even in the darkest of moments and times we can find reasons to stay alive.
Cleopatra and Frankenstein, Coco Mellors
New York is slipping from Cleo's grasp. Sure, she's at a different party every other night, but she barely knows anyone. Her student visa is running out, and she doesn't even have money for cigarettes. But then she meets Frank. Twenty years older, Frank's life is full of all the success and excess that Cleo's lacks. He offers her the chance to be happy, the freedom to paint, and the opportunity to apply for a green card. She offers him a life imbued with beauty and art-and, hopefully, a reason to cut back on his drinking. Cleo and Frank run head-first into a romance that neither of them can quite keep up with. It reshapes their lives and the lives of those around them. Ultimately, this chance meeting between two strangers outside of a New Year's Eve party changes everything, for better or worse.
In her popular debut, Coco Mellors bravely tackles addiction, mental illness, and the ways we cope with psychological struggle. An intense and in-depth character portrait and study.
Girl in Pieces, Kathleen Glasgow
A heartbreaking, triumphant, funny and hopeful story of one girl's battle with self harm.
Charlie Davis is in pieces. At seventeen, she's already lost more than most people lose in a lifetime. But she's learned how to forget it through cutting; the pain washes out the sorrow until there is nothing but calm. She doesn't have to think about her father or what happened under the bridge. Her best friend, Ellis, who is gone forever. Or the mother who has nothing left to give her. Kicked out of a special treatment center when her insurance runs out, Charlie finds herself in the bright and wild landscape of Tucson, Arizona, where she begins the unthinkable: the long journey of putting herself back together.
A painful, yet beautiful read about self-harm and the complicated inner-workings of human beings. Dense with emotion and deeply impacting, this is a heartbreaking book about living with emotional and physical scars.
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
I was supposed to be having the time of my life.
When Esther Greenwood wins an internship on a New York fashion magazine in 1953, she is elated, believing she will finally realise her dream to become a writer. But in between the cocktail parties and piles of manuscripts, Esther's life begins to slide out of control. She finds herself spiralling into depression and eventually a suicide attempt, as she grapples with difficult relationships and a society which refuses to take women's aspirations seriously.
Sylvia Plath’s semi-autobiographical classic is a must-read for Plath fans and an expose of the human psyche and the patriarchy. Plath’s only novel, this is a haunting and honest portrayal of a young woman's journey through complex mental health issues, exploring the dark depths of despair and hope for recovery.
An Unquiet Mind, Kay Redfield Jamison
Dr Kay Redfield Jamison is one of the foremost authorities on manic depression (bipolar disorder) - and has experienced its terrors and cruel allure first-hand. While pursuing her career in medicine, she was affected by the same exhilarating highs and catastrophic lows that afflicted many of her patients. An Unquiet Mind is a definitive examination of manic depression from both sides: doctor and patient, the healer and the healed. A classic memoir of enormous candour and courage, it teems with the wit and wisdom of its creator.
Combining her own scientific knowledge as a mental health professional with deeply vulnerable and candid personal experiences, this is a groundbreaking narrative of living with bi-polar disorder.
One for Sorrow, Two for Joy, Marie-Claire Amuah
Stella tries very hard to be good. She tries not to be sassy, to answer back, to be noticed. Because when Stella's father is angry, it's like lightning and thunder and hailstones.
Years later, Stella has left her troubled childhood behind and appears to have it all: a degree, a demanding job as a barrister and a group of friends who always have her back. But underneath the surface, she is haunted by her past. It will take all her grace, courage and love to heal her wounds and break free.
Set against a backdrop of London and Ghana, Marie-Claire Amuah's remarkable debut is an unforgettable exploration of intergenerational trauma. Brimming with compassion, One for Sorrow, Two for Joy offers both a sensitive portrayal of the ripple effects of domestic violence, and a defiant story of friendship, resilience and hope.
Stella counts magpies obsessively - one for sorrow, two for joy - in an attempt to control a world that often feels like it’s spiralling out of control. A rare glimpse into living with repetitive anxiety and OCD, One for Sorrow, Two for Joy is an important debut that delves into generational trauma and mental health disorders.
Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami
When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire - to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.
This Murakami classic is a searing look at Japan’s mental health epidemic and loving someone whose grasp on the world has slipped. Page-turning and mesmerising, Norwegian Wood is about learning to live with tragedy, and letting go of the past.
A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara
The million-copy bestseller, A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, is an immensely powerful and heartbreaking novel of brotherly love and the limits of human endurance.
When four graduates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their centre of gravity.
Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he'll not only be unable to overcome - but that will define his life forever.
A dark, traumatic read, not for the faint hearted, Hanya Yanagihara has created an epic of the effects of childhood abuse. But amongst the unimaginable pain and suffering is friendship and family, a beating heart of genuinely good people, aglow with love for protagonist Jude who has endured so much.
Want the very latest book recommendations from trusted notable readers? Head to our Instagram to discover more.