New Year, New Reads: Four Mental Health-Themed Books to Nourish Your Spirit in 2024

By Leah Harris

​Books are good medicine. For as long as the written word has existed, people have found solace and strength in the thoughts of others revealed on the page. The field of bibliotherapy is based on research that shows how reading can nurture our mental health while expanding our minds, as well as our sense of what’s possible for ourselves and our world. Bibliotherapy is a powerful self-help tool as well as a practice to be enjoyed with others in book clubs or other settings. Here are four books to ignite your spirit and imagination in the new year.

Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscalculation by Camoghne Felix

Poet and essayist Camoghne Felix pens a memoir that grapples with themes of love, loss, trauma, and reclamation. After a “monumental breakup,” Felix is hospitalized. She examines her condition of “dyscalculia,” or difficulty in learning math, as a lens through which to examine her history and experiences in life and love. "Dyscalculia is a frank exploration of pleasure, heartbreak, and reclamation. It makes a case for softness, for lostness, for black girlhood, that rejects containment and asks instead for care, “ writes Raven Leilani, author of Luster.

The Night Parade: A Speculative Memoir By Jami Nakamura Lin ​

Nakamura Lin’s memoir interrogates the concept of recovery, so common to modern mental health narratives through the lens of ancestral storytelling. She weaves her own experiences of living with bipolar disorder with meditations of grief after the death of her father, with stories about the yokai and other mythic figures from Japanese, Taiwanese, and Okinawan legend. " “Jami Nakamura Lin has reinvented the genre of memoir, weaving an intricate braid of fable, memory, art, cultural legacy, and legend into a gorgeous tapestry of the stories that made her,” writes Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, award-winning author of The Fact of A Body. ​

The Woman in Me By Britney Spears ​

Spears’ memoir illuminates issues relating to women, self-determination, and mental health at a time when conservatorship is being increasingly championed in public policy. “I had been so infantilized that I was losing pieces of what made me feel like myself,” she writes. “The conservatorship stripped me of my womanhood, made me into a child. I became more of an entity than a person onstage. I had always felt music in my bones and my blood; they stole that from me.” The Los Angeles Times said of The Woman in Me: “You can sense Spears gaining her power back, inch by inch. The Woman in Me is a worthy act of self-resurrection." ​

The Invisible Ache: Black Men Identifying Their Pain and Reclaiming Their Power by Courtney B. Vance and Robin L. Smith

Actor Courtney B. Vance lost both his father and godson to suicide. The Invisible Ache seeks to center the lived experiences of Black men, so often left out of mainstream conversations on mental health. With Dr. Robin L. Smith (“Dr. Robin”), Vance seeks to provide a “guide for Black men navigating life's ups and downs, reclaiming mental well-being, and examining broken pieces to find whole, full-hearted living.” The New York Journal of Books calls The Invisible Ache "…an inspiring story of what [Black men] can achieve personally and professionally when they have the tools and support necessary to examine their pain and find their joy.”

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Leah Harris is a non-binary, queer, neurodivergent, disabled Jewish writer, facilitator, and organizer working in the service of truth-telling, justice-doing, and liberation. They’ve had work published in the New York Times, CNN, and Pacific Standard. You can learn more about their work at their website and follow them on Instagram.