Books like Going sane by Adam Phillips

A groundbreaking guide to embracing vulnerability and courage.

Explore the path to inner peace and freedom with Michael A. Singer’s practical guide to letting go of limiting thoughts and emotions.

Alan Watts examines the paradox of human insecurity, arguing that the pursuit of stability breeds anxiety. Drawing on philosophy, religion, and psychology, he invites Western readers to reconsider their relationship with time, pain, and the world.

Johann Hari investigates the roots of depression and anxiety, arguing that modern lifestyles—not chemical imbalances—are the primary culprits, and presents nine real causes along with seven alternative solutions.

The Road Less Traveled encourages facing life's challenges as a path to deeper self‑understanding, emotional maturity, and healthier loving relationships.

Kristin Neff’s *Self‑Compassion* draws on a decade of research to explain how practicing self‑kindness can replace self‑criticism, depression, and anxiety with deeper happiness and self‑acceptance.

The Gift of Therapy is a practical guide that compiles Irvin D. Yalom’s 35‑year experience as a psychiatrist into 85 thoughtful, often original therapeutic ideas for counsellors and patients.

Over the last forty years, there have been numerous attempts to critique the theory and practice of mental health care. Taking its lead from anti-psychiatry, Critical Perspectives on Mental Health seeks to explore and evaluate the claims of mainstream mental health ideologies and to establish what implications the critiques of these perspectives have for practice. Critical Perspectives on Mental Health will be essential reading for students and those working in the social work and mental health care professions.

When it was first published in France in 1961 as Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la Folie à l'âge Classique, few had heard of a thirty-four year old philosopher by the name of Michel Foucault. By the time an abridged English edition was published in 1967 as Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault had shaken the intellectual world. This translation is the first English edition of the complete French texts of the first and second edition, including all prefaces and appendices, some of them unavailable in the existing French edition. History of Madness begins in the Middle Ages with vivid descriptions of the exclusion and confinement of lepers. Why, Foucault asks, when the leper houses were emptied at the end of the Middle Ages, were they turned into places of confinement for the mad? Why, within the space of several months in 1656, was one out of every hundred people in Paris confined? Shifting brilliantly from Descartes and early Enlightenment thought to the founding of the Hôpital Général in Paris and the work of early psychiatrists Philippe Pinel and Samuel Tuke, Foucault focuses throughout, not only on scientific and medical analyses of madness, but also on the philosophical and cultural values attached to the mad. He also urges us to recognize the creative and liberating forces that madness represents, brilliantly drawing on examples from Goya, Nietzsche, Van Gogh and Artaud. The History of Madness is an inspiring and classic work that challenges us to understand madness, reason and power and the forces that shape them.

This book presents a clear and in-depth account of abnormal psychology. It focuses on both clinical descriptions, using illustrative case studies at the beginning of each section, and on the implications of the major theoretical perspectives and relevant empirical evidence for clinical treatment. It provides a very readable and up-to-date review of topics including childhood behaviour disorders, anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, personality disorders and models of abnormal behaviour. Alan Carr illustrates a scientific approach to the understanding of these aspects of abnormal psychology. Both the content and style of this book will help students understand a complex area of psychology.