The books listed in this post are incredibly heavy and deal with topics people may find triggering. Please take care of yourself and make the informed decision if you’d like to continue reading this post.
Trigger warnings for the books below include: suicide, anti-Indigenous racism, patient abuse, electro-compulsive therapy, forced lobotomy, self-harm, anti-Semitism, sadism, sexual assault/rape, incest, pedophilia, severe clinical depression, psychotic behavior/breaks, schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder
Please note, the covers and publishers listed with each title are for the editions Zara read, and may not be the cover of the book’s original publication. The years are the original publication of each title.
You can’t stop the future.
You can’t rewind the past.
The only way to learn the secret . . . is to press play.
Clay Jensen returns home from school to find a strange package with his name on it lying on his porch. Inside he discovers several cassette tapes recorded by Hannah Baker–his classmate and crush–who committed suicide two weeks earlier. Hannah’s voice tells him that there are thirteen reasons why she decided to end her life. Clay is one of them. If he listens, he’ll find out why.
Clay spends the night crisscrossing his town with Hannah as his guide. He becomes a firsthand witness to Hannah’s pain, and as he follows Hannah’s recorded words throughout his town, what he discovers changes his life forever.
Tyrannical Nurse Ratched rules her ward in an Oregon State mental hospital with a strict and unbending routine, unopposed by her patients, who remain cowed by mind-numbing medication and the threat of electric shock therapy. But her regime is disrupted by the arrival of McMurphy–the swaggering, fun-loving trickster with a devilish grin who resolves to oppose her rules on behalf of his fellow inmates. His struggle is seen through the eyes of Chief Bromden, a seemingly mute half-Indian patient who understands McMurphy’s heroic attempt to do battle with the powers that keep them imprisoned. Ken Kesey’s extraordinary first novel is an exuberant, ribald and devastatingly honest portrayal of the boundaries between sanity and madness.
This is the one book on this list that was assigned to Zara while in an English class (Eighth Grade). While fae is glad to have read it (since Nurse Ratched is a cultural reference made in many TV shows and movies), fae would not read it now given the main character was charged for raping a fifteen year-old girl and the narrator faces a lot of racism for being an Indigenous person in America.
The classic novel about a young woman’s struggle against madness, with a new afterword by the author.
Hailed by The New York Times as “convincing and emotionally gripping” upon its publication in 1964, Joanne Greenberg’s semi-autobiographical novel stands as a timeless and unforgettable portrayal of mental illness. Enveloped in the dark inner kingdom of her schizophrenia, sixteen-year-old Deborah is haunted by private tormentors that isolate her from the outside world. With the reluctant and fearful consent of her parents, she enters a mental hospital where she will spend the next three years battling to regain her sanity with the help of a gifted psychiatrist. As Deborah struggles toward the possibility of the “normal” life she and her family hope for, the reader is inexorably drawn into her private suffering and deep determination to confront her demons.
A modern classic, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden remains every bit as poignant, gripping, and relevant today as when it was first published.
In 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist she’d never seen before, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen was put in a taxi and sent to McLean Hospital. She spent most of the next two years on the ward for teenage girls in a psychiatric hospital as renowned for its famous clientele—Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor, and Ray Charles—as for its progressive methods of treating those who could afford its sanctuary.
Kaysen’s memoir encompasses horror and razor-edged perception while providing vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers. It is a brilliant evocation of a “parallel universe” set within the kaleidoscopically shifting landscape of the late sixties. Girl, Interrupted is a clear-sighted, unflinching document that gives lasting and specific dimension to our definitions of sane and insane, mental illness and recovery.
Is your favorite mental health-themed novel on this list? Share what you love about your pick. If not, let us know what it is in the comments.
