Book picks similar to
Depression Can Be Fun by Helen McNallen


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Lift


Kelly Corrigan - 2010
    In Lift, Corrigan weaves together three true and unforgettable stories of adults willing to experience emotional hazards in exchange for the gratifications of raising children.Lift takes its name from hang gliding, a pursuit that requires flying directly into rough air, because turbulence saves a glider from "sinking out." For Corrigan, this wisdom--that to fly requires chaotic, sometimes even violent passages--becomes a metaphor for all of life's most meaningful endeavors, particularly the great flight that is parenting.Corrigan serves it up straight--how mundanely and fiercely her children have been loved, how close most lives occasionally come to disaster, and how often we fall short as mothers and fathers. Lift is for everyone who has been caught off guard by the pace and vulnerability of raising children, to remind us that our work is important and our time limited.Like Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea, Lift is a meditation on the complexities of a woman's life, and like Corrigan's memoir, The Middle Place, Lift is boisterous and generous, a book readers can't wait to share.

Musings of a 20-Something Mom, and the Perils of being a Mommy Blogger


Jenny Schoberl - 2011
    Moms are everywhere; they've even taken over Blogging. Hundreds of blogs about how Fluffy got his first tooth, or Muffy said a new word. It's enough to make people want to vomit sugar.I've been told that i'm not your typical mom, and my blog is not your typical blog; I've even been called the "Eminem of Mommy Blogging”, honest, blunt, and usually vulgar. This book is my experiences and stories as I ventured through the Mommy Blogging world, trying to make light of some disgusting situations, and it wasn't always pretty. I had to learn the hard way that blatant honesty may not always be the best policy... not if you want to keep your kids."Musings of a 20-something Mom" is a lesson on how NOT to blog, unless you want to piss off your friends, family, and get a pack of crazies chasing after you; and a reminder that when it comes to parenting, there's always going to be someone out there saying "you're doing it wrong!"

Carrier: Untangling the Danger in My DNA


Bonnie J. Rough - 2010
    Rough receives the test results that confirm she is a carrier of the genetic condition "hypohidrotic ectodermal dysplasia," or H.E.D., it propels her on a journey deep into her family's past in the American West.At first glance, H.E.D. seems only to be a superficial condition: a peculiar facial bone structure, sparse hair, few teeth, and an inability to sweat. But a closer look reveals the source of a lifetime of infections, breathing problems, and drug dependency for Bonnie's grandfather Earl, who suffered from the disorder. After a boyhood as a small-town oddity and an adulthood fraught with disaster, Earl died penniless and alone at the age of 49. Bonnie's mother was left with an inheritance that included not just the gene for H.E.D., but also the emotional pain that came from witnessing her father's misery.As Bonnie and her husband consider becoming parents themselves, their biological legacy haunts every decision. The availability of genetic testing gives them new choices to make, choices more excruciating than any previous generation could have imagined. Ultimately, Carrier is a story of a modern moral crisis, one that reveals the eternal tension between past and future."

Love Works Like This: Moving from One Kind of Life to Another


Lauren Slater - 2002
    Slater, career-oriented and willfully autonomous, charts her own personal journey and decision-making process, starting with a list of the pros and cons, about having a child. The cons are many, the pros only one: “learning a new kind of love.” But what will that love look like? How does one reconcile the needs of the self with the demands of others? How do couples go from the dyad that is a marriage to the triad that is a family? And how can Slater adjust to losing precious control of her own carefully developed life?Slater’s complex biological and psychological history also lies at the core of this unique and yet strikingly universal story. One of the first people ever to take Prozac, she chronicles the impossibly conflicting advice regarding pregnancy and antidepressants, and explains the rationale behind her eventual decision to stop taking the medication during her first trimester. This is Slater’s first encounter with self-sacrifice, and for her a crossroad at which modern medicine and basic human love meet. Love Works Like This is a richly written book by “an enormously poetic and ebullient writer” (Elle magazine), an author who writes with “beauty and bravery” (Los Angeles Times Book Review) about falling in love, about growing into the ability to put someone else’s life ahead of your own, and about the rich rewards we can draw from the courage to exchange one kind of happy life for another.

What About the Boy?


Stephen Gallup - 2011
    He cried most of the time, and thrashed about as if in pain. He wasn't learning how to crawl, talk, or interact normally. Doctors told his parents to seek counseling, because nothing could help their son, and the quality of their own lives was at risk. Refusal to accept that advice changed their lives forever. What About the Boy? chronicles a family's rejection of hopelessness and their commitment to the pursuit of normalcy.

Beyond Consequences, Logic, and Control: A Love Based Approach to Helping Children With Severe Behaviors, Volume 2


Heather T. Forbes - 2008
    This abundance of stress is impacting families and in many cases, manifesting itself in children with difficult and severe behaviors. Homes often turn into intense fighting grounds of power struggles and control battles parents find themselves in us against them scenarios with their children. Tension continually builds and before long, parents are feeling completely overwhelmed, powerless, and resentful of their children. As parents implement traditional parenting techniques, parenting in a way that most parenting books recommend, they find their situations becoming worse, not better as promised these resources. It doesn't have to be this way! Heather T. Forbes, LCSW, offers families a new view to parenting children with difficult and severe behaviors. As a parent herself who experienced dark days (and years) following the adoption of her two children, she offers a ground-breaking approach to parenting that shows parents a proven way to develop strong and loving relationships with their children. In her new book, Beyond Consequences, Logic, and Control: A Love Based Approach to Helping Children with Severe Behaviors, Volume 2, Heather offers practical and effective solutions based in scientific research, coupled with professional and personal experience. She is a master at bridging the gap between academic research and real life when the rubber hits the road parenting. This book is written in an easy to understand and easy to grasp format for anyone working with or parenting children with difficult or severe behaviors. The first six chapters discuss the principles of her love-based parenting paradigm. A newunderstanding of why traditional parenting techniques are ineffective with children with difficult behaviors is given, along with clear and concise explanations of the science behind trauma and negative early life experiences. The next seven chapters address specific behaviors, including poor social skills, homework battles, demanding behaviors, self-injury, defensive attitudes, no conscience, and chores. Each chapter gives specific examples of how to implement her parenting principles, empowering parents to make amazing and permanent changes in their homes. All the examples given throughout these chapters are true stories provided by parents who read and implemented her first book, Volume 1. The book ends with a parenting bonus section where more real-life stories from real-life parents with real-life children are given. These examples range in the spectrum of the ages of the children and a variety of behavioral issues. This book offers hope and healing. It goes beyond just changing a child s behaviors but goes to the level of healing for all family members. This book has the power to literally change families for life and to help families find the peace in their homes that they dreamed of from the beginning--and the peace they deserve!

Dominoes: Unbreakable Spirit - The Somizi Mhlongo Story


Somizi Mhlongo - 2017
    Born of acting royalty, his father Ndaba "Mshefane" Mhlongo was an incomparable comedy genius and his mother Mary Twala is a revered performer who is still active in the industry to this day. Even at his poorest, Somizi was rich. His life filled with magical stardust moments. One too many times he emerged from the dark valley of sorrows only more energised and revitalised to tackle this thing called life again. In this biography he opens up about his childhood of deprivation and how his destiny was in the arts. He became a performer at a young age and expanded his horizons as he traveled the country with his parents. The original child star, Somizi was on TV while still at school. He couldn't escape the clutches of the stage and cameras. What awaited him was a charmed life as a Sarafina! star touring the world until tragedy struck when his father passed away and he returned home. Somizi speaks frankly about discovering his sexuality and coming to terms with it. His chutzpah and never-say-die attitude saw him look bravely in the eye of chauvinism and prejudice to change attitudes. Immerse yourself in a story of survival and the ABCs of beating the odds. For each time he was down and out, Somizi came back stronger than before. Today he nibbles on the uppercrust of South African entertainment as a million rand empire. He is a radio personality, Idols SA judge, a much sought-after MC and a dependable face as an ambassador of several campaigns and products. But it was not always that way, until he pushed down the walls and they fell like dominoes.

The Student Nurse Handbook: A Survival Guide


Bethann Siviter - 2004
    It provides hints, tips and practical advice on aspects such as placements, reading research, living as a student and the nursing profession as a whole.

Imposter: On booze, crippling self-doubt and coming out the other side


Matt Chisholm - 2021
    

Free from Lies: Discovering Your True Needs


Alice Miller - 2007
    Dr. Alice Miller, author of such world-renowned books as the Drama of the Gifted Child and The Truth Will Set You Free, has devoted her life to empowering people who have severe symptoms from denying that they suffered physical and emotional abuse as children. Here, in Free from Lies, she tackles uncharted territory as she shows how former victims can finally heal the scars of their youth by finding the true history of their childhood instead of denying it.Abandoning traditional concepts of psychoanalysis that often - like society on the whole - protect the parents and accuse the child, Dr. Miller explains why a therapist should become a partial, empathic witness to the survivor of obvious cruelty rather than a neutral analyst. She further provides a guide to help patients find the right therapist who will always and unconditionally stay on the side of the wounded child. Dr. Miller explains as well how to identify the causes of the unconscious pain that manifests itself later as depression, self-mutilation, primal inadequacy, and loneliness.The journey "from victims to destroyer" explores the dynamic that turns once-abused children into abusive parents. Dr. Miller's revolutionary analysis of this cycle of destruction helps us understand what occurs when the abusive behavior reaches beyond the family unit to threaten the whole society. Abusers are able to deny the most obvious and absolutely undeniable facts without the slightest hesitation. They imitate their parents, who were teaching them to lie by telling their children that they were beaten "out of love." As Free from Lies makes clear, this cycle of suppression and repression of truth originates in a cultural mindset that accepts, and even condones, child abuse by calling it "the right upbringing." Excerpts from Dr. Miller's answers to the startling readers' letters sent to her Web site show that a wide variety of abuse is inflicted daily on children throughout the world.The media's attention is only captured by extreme cases, but the plight of children who are regularly subjected to ordinary abuse in their "upbringing," like spanking, kicking, and others forms of humiliation, remains silenced or even highly encouraged by many.Held hostage by anger, guilt, and denial, survivors of child abuse will find in Free from Lies the tools necessary to break the cycle, because Dr. Miller's compassion, experience, and guidance provide a much-needed liberation from the crippling lies transferred to us for millennia.

Baby. Boom!


Helen Wallen - 2018
    Molly's unexpected pregnancy somehow turns her boyfriend into the poncy-vegan-nut-milk-enforcer, but she breezes it, as she breezes everything. (Including still being able to eat avocados much to Emily's annoyance.)Liz quickly realises if she's to move her life on, she needs to get rid of the married man she's in love with... especially now she's realised he's been hiding more than his wedding ring...

Where the Roots Reach for Water: A Personal and Natural History of Melancholia


Jeffery Smith - 1999
    Eventually, all his prescribed antidepressant medications proved ineffective. Unlike so many personal accounts, Where the Roots Reach for Water tells the story of what happened to Smith after he decided to give them up. Trying to learn how to make a life with his illness, Smith sets out to get at the essence of--using the old term for depression--melancholia.Deftly woven into his "personal history" is a "natural history" of this ancient illness. Drawing on centuries of art, writing and medical treatises, Smith finds ancient links between melancholia and spirituality, love and sex, music and philosophy, gardening, and, importantly, our relationship with landscapes.

The Anger Workbook for Teens: Activities to Help You Deal with Anger and Frustration


Raychelle Cassada Lohmann - 2009
    And while anger is a natural human emotion, different people handle it differently. Some hold in their anger and let it build, some lash out with hurtful words, some resort to fighting, and some just explode. If you've noticed yourself beginning to take out your frustrations on the people you love most—your parents, brothers or sisters, and friends—it may be time to make a change. The Anger Workbook for Teens includes thirty-seven exercises designed to show you effective skills to help you deal with feelings of rage without losing it. By completing just one ten-minute worksheet a day, you'll find out what's triggering your anger, look at the ways you react, and learn skills and techniques for getting your anger under control. You'll develop a personal anger profile and learn to notice the physical symptoms you feel when you become enraged, then find out how to calm those feelings and respond more sensitively to others. Once you fully understand your anger, you'll be better prepared to deal with your feelings in the moment and never lose your cool. The activities in this workbook will help you notice things that make you angry, handle frustrating situations without getting angry, and effectively communicate your feelings. Most of all, these activities can help you learn to change how you respond to anger. Change is not easy, but with the right frame of mind and set of skills, you can do it. This book is designed to help you understand how both your mind and body respond to anger, how you can handle this anger constructively, and relaxation techniques for dealing with anger in a healthy way, so that you can not only control your anger, but your life as a whole.

My Heart Can't Even Believe It: A Story of Science, Love, and Down Syndrome


Amy Silverman - 2016
    And that is the case with My Heart Can't Even Believe It, by journalist, blogger, and NPR contributor Amy Silverman. Amy bravely looks at her life, before and after her daughter Sophie was born, and reflects on her transformation from "a spoiled, self-centered brat," who used words like retard and switched lines at the Safeway to avoid a bagger with special needs, into the mother of a kid with Down syndrome and all that her new identity entails. She describes her evolution as gradual, one built by processing her fears and facing questions both big and small about Sophie, Down syndrome, and her place in the world. Funny, touching, and honest, this wonderful book looks at a daughter and her power to change minds and fill hearts with love so deep.

Trending in Love


Pankaj Dubey - 2020
    A spat with a politician's son pushes her take up a big challenge-to become an IAS. At the same time, a small-town boy, Aamir, is nudged into studying for the civil services too. Their hard work pays off when both become rank holders. And soon their lives come together at the IAS Training Academy, Mussoorie. Love blossoms, but when they decide to spend their lives together, all hell breaks loose. Their religious difference become a reason for clashes between the two communities, social media explodes and things take a dangerous turn. It seems hate has triumphed over love. What will be Sanam and Aamir's fate?A heady mix of dreams and desire, this is a story of undying love in the face of our society's most dangerous beliefs.