One of my favorite pastimes is recommending books to people, and there is no genre I’ve read more of than mental health. Below are 7 of those books specially chosen for the aspiring mental health reader. Not all of them will be for everyone, but at least one of them could be for you.
The Beauty of What Remains by Steve Leder
(Best book about grief)
Steve Leder is the senior rabbi of one of the largest synagogues in the world. He has years of experience sitting with people in their final moments and in The Beauty of What Remains, he weaves together the stories of those people with his own story of loss. In this short book, he answers three profound questions: 1) What do I say to someone who is grieving? 2) How do I deal with the death of a loved one? 3) How do I come to terms with my own death? If you’ve ever asked yourself any of these questions (which, come on, you have), then read this book. Here’s one quote I’ve kept with me that I’d like to share with all of my fellow death-anxiety friends out there: “Dying people are not afraid of dying. If you are afraid of dying, it is not your day. Anxiety is for the living.”
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
(Best book about half-memoir half-psychological treatise)
Viktor Frankl’s book is in my Mount Rushmore of life-changing books, as it is for many who have come across it. Frankl is a survivor of the holocaust, and this book is about his experience in four different concentration camps. Frankl noticed that during that time, the prisoners who had the highest chance of survival were also the ones who had a sense of meaning and purpose. People who had families to live for, or a home they hoped to return to. Frankl maintained his sense of meaning by working on the psychological manuscript for this very concept, which would later be called Logotherapy. It is devastating and hopeful and puts on full display the resilience of the human mind.
Love’s Executioner by Irvin Yalom
(Best book of short stories pt. I)
I’ve annoyed many of my friends and family members talking about the books of Irvin Yalom. Love’s Executioner is one of Yalom’s books of short stories, each of which tells the story of a client and his existentialist approach to treating them. The first story has everything: twists and turns, forbidden romance, friends becoming enemies, enemies becoming friends, and the moral that not everything in the therapy room is as it seems. His books tend to be aimed more at the therapy student, but I think the therapy patient can get just as much out of them. That’s my Yalom rant. I promise that’s the last I’ll bring him up in this list.
The Schopenhauer Cure by Irvin Yalom
(Best book on group therapy)
Ok, I lied. One more Yalom book. And it’s a novel (mostly)! Group therapy is an area in which Irvin Yalom is a bit of a pioneer, and he uses The Schopenhauer Cure as a vehicle to teach his clinical philosophy and show it in practice. Yalom somehow seamlessly ties together two very different stories: a novelization of a present-day therapy group and a biography of the 18th-century German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer. Give yourself a break from all of the non-fiction on this list and have a little fun for once!
The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk
(book with the most social capital)
This is the book you read so you can tell your friends you read it. The Body Keeps the Score is kind of like The Matrix. It’s dense and technical but it will open your eyes to a whole new world, and you’ll pretend to your friends that you understood all of it. It’s the most science-heavy of the list and incorporates a lot of clinical research, providing insight into trauma and the physiological impact it has on the body. Any mental health book list would not be complete without this book.
Good Morning, Monster by Catherine Gildiner
(Best book of short stories pt. II)
Another book of short stories, but this one is much heavier than Yalom’s. Catherine Gildiner tells five stories that each deal with intense trauma and resulting mysteries of the subconscious mind. If you’re interested in seeing how the science from “The Body Keeps the Score” can actually manifest in the human mind and body, read this book.
The Courage to be Disliked by Fumitake Koga and Ichiro Kishimi
(Best clinical philosophy book)
Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Alfred Adler are three of the most prolific, foundational figures in psychotherapy, and I’m guessing you’ve only heard of two of them. The Courage to be Disliked teaches Alfred Adler’s individual psychology and does so in an incredibly engaging way. The authors wrote this book as a Socratic dialogue between a “Philosopher” and “Youth,” leaning into the philosophy of Adler’s teachings rather than the clinical application. There are going to be ideas in here that you might instinctively balk at (see chapters: “Trauma Does Not Exist” and “People Fabricate Anger”) but if you power through, you’ll come away with some incredibly poignant and useful lessons.
Written by:
Daniel Fabi
Mental Health Counseling Intern