An effective psychiatrist or psychologist will own a bookshelf stocked with recommended reading for his patients.
He will have read a host of books on various topics, from sleep strategies to marital advice, so he knows what he is recommending. My psychiatrist has compiled the following list of recommended books for patients. It may be helpful to you too.
1. “A Deeper Shade of Blue” by Ruta Nonacs. Nonacs, the associate director of the Center for Women’s Mental Health at Massachusetts General Hospital and an instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, offers a comprehensive guide on depression during the childbearing ages.
2. “Understanding Depression” by J. Raymond de Paulo, Jr. A complete handbook for anyone affected by depression and its related mood disorders. A timeless resource that answers every basic question about depression asked by a layman and presents modern science in a way that is easy to understand.
3. “Bipolar Disorder” by Francis Mondimore. An accessible guide for persons diagnosed with bipolar disorder and their family members, including information on treatment options, building a support system, improving quality of life, and planning for emergencies.
4. “An Unquiet Mind” by Kay Redfield Jamison. Writing from the dual perspectives of the healer and the healed, Jamison pens a powerful, candid memoir that has become a bestselling classic.
5. “Against Depression” by Peter Kramer. A sequel to his bestseller, “Listening to Prozac,” Kramer present readers with groundbreaking new research on depression as well as pathways toward resilience. He asserts that depression is the most devastating disease, refuting the notion of “heroic melancholy,” but also offers his readers hope to overcome it.
6. “How You Can Survive When They’re Depressed” by Anne Sheffield. A useful resource for family members and friends of persons suffering from depression. Sheffield offers an understanding of depression for persons affected by the illness as well as coping strategies that can be adopted.
7. “Should You Leave?” by Peter Kramer. A very thoughtful book on why people are drawn to each other, how they often end up driving each other crazy, and how figuring out how not to leave is just what they need most. His answer to the title question is almost always “no.”
8. “The Five Love Languages” by Gary Chapman. A helpful guide for couples to understand each other and communicate more clearly. By identifying your partner’s primary love language — quality time, words of affirmation, gifts, acts of service, or physical touch — you will be able to strengthen and nurture your relationship.
9. “Monogamy” by Marianne Brandon. This is an intriguing book about embracing monogamy by recognizing that it takes hard work and continual, deliberate decisions.
10. “How to Love” by Gordon Livingston. Livingston, a practicing psychiatrist, advises readers on how to find the right life partner by identifying dangerous patterns of behavior in relationships and then naming some essential virtues. The book is great for teens or young adults just beginning to date seriously.
11. “Staring at the Sun” by Irving Yalom. Once we confront our own mortality, asserts Yalom, we are free to love more deeply, communicate more clearly, appreciate goodness and beauty more often, and take more risks. We can also overcome much of our anxiety because the fear of death, he believes, is usually at the heart of our panic.
12. “Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart” by Gordon Livingston. Livingston culls his advice from decades of listening to patients tell him why they are unhappy as well as the hard-earned wisdom he gleaned after losing two sons within a 13-month period (his oldest to suicide, his youngest to leukemia). Organized into 30 compact chapters, or “truths,” he tackles challenging topics in accessible language.
13. “Quiet Your Mind and Get to Sleep” by Colleen Carney and Rachel Manber. This resourceful workbook offers a summary of cognitive behavioral therapy strategies, and is especially effective if the insomnia is experienced in the context of anxiety, depression, and chronic pain.
14. “Saving Normal” by Allen Frances. From the Chair of the DSM-IV Task Force, the “most powerful psychiatrist in America” (New York Times) comes a bold critique of the state of psychiatry in modern times, and how the direction that the DSM-V is taking us — mislabeling everyday problems as mental illness — undermines the resilience with which we were born and is destructive not only to individuals, but also to society as a whole.