The best books to help you understand mental anguish from inside a body in distress

I am a superfan of Andrew Solomon’s and I urge you to read absolutely anything you can get your hands on, but this book is the actual Bible for understanding depression from the inside out. 

It seems uncommon that when your life is going well, when everything seems to be working out in your favor, that depression should descend and rob you of all your joy, but that’s exactly what happened to Andrew Solomon. The way he writes about depression is beyond comprehension because it’s beautiful and profound, exacting and sweeping. Reading this, or anything of his, is like getting your organs tattooed with the ink of his experience. This isn’t simply one man’s account of his uncompromising depression, rather it’s a survey and sociological account of depression. Inspired by a 1998 article Solomon wrote for The New Yorker, this book is a wild achievement. Yes, it’s long and often unwieldy, just like life, and just like depression. This book, like William Styron’s Darkness Visible, is an American classic.

This wildly important book is about what it takes to become a fully realized black man in racist white America. On top of that already monumental struggle are more struggles: anorexia, sexual violence, abuse, obesity, gambling, the construction of identity, and excavating the self and others, to get at the truth. I’d say that this is perhaps one of the best books on trauma that I’ve read. The sentences themselves, the rhythmic syntax of their musicality, is just one emotional heartbeat of this stunning, painfully honest, and vulnerable work of art. 

A truly insightful book—it is not a memoir—but rather a type of philosophical inquiry about living with schizoaffective disorder, and trying to make sense of the nonsensical, and order the disordered. This is both the work of an analytic researcher and the personal narrative of a person hoping to correct the misconceptions and branding of schizophrenia, but she writes beautifully and poignantly about the identity and branding of the mentally ill, and the stigma of chronic illness. My favorite writing about mental illness is writing done from inside the suffering, and Wang does that here, especially when she’s under the spell of Cotard’s Syndrome, a particularly chilling disorder that convinces the sufferer they are dead. There is no solution to chronic illness, there is only uncertainty, and while we all live in uncertainty—and many of us are adept deniers, Wang is not one of them. 

There isn’t a human who lives in this life without accruing some trauma. Small t trauma or Big T Trauma, it doesn’t really matter. The body, like a container, does not distinguish or have a preference for what is being held inside. This book is a wildly important read for everyone. It teaches what those who have been made aware of their trauma already know—emotional pain is inside the body, and in order to process what’s trapped there, we need to go inside. Trauma occurs when the past remains present; the memory of the trauma doesn’t get absorbed or processed, it simply stays in place, inside your body replaying itself over and over, and this constant replay affects the body and brain on a physical level, and yet, because it’s invisible, it—like all mental disorders, isn’t treated with the same urgency as illnesses that can be seen. This book is overflowing with information and is, like the Noonday Demon, a classic.

Confession: as of this writing I am only ⅓ of the way through this book, but I like it immensely and find it immensely soothing and validating. A cursory search on Dr. Julie Smith, a therapist, tells me that she is “TikTok famous” and remains very popular on social media. This is not how I came across her work, or this book. This book is an excellent primer for how to survive being human in this world, with vital inside information from decades of therapeutic practice on how to face daily challenges and become attuned to our mental health. Filled with insights, strategies, and explanations that are both practice and relatable, this is a great book to gift to people of all ages.