90+ Of Your Favorite Books About Mental Illness
This Riot Recommendation on books about mental illness is sponsored by A Tragic Kind of Wonderful by Eric Lindstrom.
For Mel Hannigan, bipolar disorder makes life unpredictable. Her latest struggle is balancing her growing feelings in a new relationship with her instinct to conceal her diagnosis by keeping everyone at arm’s length. But when a former friend confronts Mel with the truth about the way their relationship ended, deeply buried secrets threaten to upend her shaky equilibrium.
As the walls of Mel’s compartmentalized world crumble, she fears that no one will accept her if they discover what she’s been hiding. But would her friends really abandon her if they learned the truth? More importantly, can Mel risk everything to find out?
In YA fiction, characters affected by mental illness simultaneously grapple with the myriad changes that make growing up so aggressively unforgettable. And, regardless of age range or genre, reading about struggles with mental illness can be cathartic, it can be discomfiting, and it can help people relate to those affected.
We asked you to share your favorite books about mental illness, and you responded. Here are more than 90 of your favorites!
The Masked Truth by Kelley Armstrong
The Silver Lining Playbook by Matthew Quick
Ordinary People by Judith Guest
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Undercurrents: A Life Beneath the Surface by Martha Manning
Darkness Visible by William Styron
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden by Joanne Greenberg
Night Falls Fast by Kay Redfield Jamison
Belzhar by Meg Wolitzer
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
The Memory of Light by Francisco X. Stork
The Quiet Room by Amanda Bennett and Lori Schiller
Furiously Happy by Jenny Lawson
We Are the Ants by Shaun David Hutchinson
The First Time She Drowned by Kerry Kletter
Highly Illogical Behavior by John Corey Whaley
When We Collided by Emery Lord
Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me: A Graphic Memoir by Ellen Forney
An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness by Kay Redfield Jamison
Veronika Decides to Die by Paulo Coelho
The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression by Andrew Solomon
Wild Awake by Hilary T. Smith
Bright Lines by Tanwi Nandini Islam
Crazy by Pete Earley
Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
January First by Michael Schofield
Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel
I Hate You, Don’t Leave Me by Hal Straus and Jerold Jay Kreisman
Women and Madness by Phyllis Chesler
The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy
A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar
Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen
It’s Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini
The Buddha and the Borderline by Kiera Van Gelder
The Weight of Zero by Karen Fortunati
Splintered by A.G. Howard
Navigating Early by Clare Vanderpool
Em and the Big Hoom by Jerry Pinto
Finding Alice by Melody Carlson
Why Am I still Depressed? by Dr. James Phelps
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
The Masked Truth by Kelley Armstrong
Highly Illogical Behavior by John Corey Whaley
Made You Up by Francesca Zappia
Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon
A Madness So Discreet by Mindy McGinnis
Small As An Elephant by Jennifer Jacobson
Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett
Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker
The Three Christs of Ypsilanti by Milton Rokeach
Spiritual Gift of Madness by Seth Farber
Muses, Madmen, & Prophets by Daniel B. Smith
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
Hurry Down Sunshine by Michael Greenberg
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden by Hannah Green
All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews
The Vegetarian by Han Kang
The Highly Sensitive Person by Elaine Aron
My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor
The Ghost in the Machine by Arthur Koestler
Stick Figure: A Diary of My Former Self by Lori Gottlieb
A World Without You by Beth Revis
I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb
Father Melancholy’s Daughter by Gail Godwin
Touched With Fire by Kay Redfield Jamison
Twenty-Four Shadows by Tanya Joy Peterson
My Life In a Nutshell by Tanya Joy Peterson
Lisa, Bright and Dark by John Neufield
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
Finding Audrey by Sophie Kinsella
Bleeding Violet by Dia Reeves
Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire
Challenger Deep by Neal Shusterman
The Unlikely Hero of Room 13B by Teresa Toten
Hold Still by Nina Lacour
Your Voice is All I Hear by Leah Scheier
Fig by Sarah Elizabeth Schantz
Under Rose-Tainted Skies by Louise Gornall
Darkness Visible by William Styron
Hyperbole & a Half by Allie Brosh
Swing Low: A Life by Miriam Toews
The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney by Henry Handel Richardson
The Center Cannot Hold by Elyn Saks
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
A Quiet Strong Voice by Lee Horbachewski
Sights Unseen by Kaye Gibbons
Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher
The Nao of Brown by Glyn Dillon
What are your favorite books about mental illness?
