🌞 Mental Health Awareness Month ☔

  

Anxiety, depression, PTSD, bi-polar disorder--all of these, and many more, are prevalent in society today, and on an individual basis it can be difficult to maneuver through any mental health disorder. For the month of May, we observe Mental Health Awareness Month in order to bring attention to the common occurrence of the above-mentioned in everyday life. In fact, 1 in 5 people suffer from some sort of mental illness of some sort at some level. 

At Jessup Library, we have a superfluity of books on mental illness and how to treat it from a professional, as well as a personal level. Matt Haig tackles anxiety in his book Notes On A Nervous Planet, using his own experiences with anxiety to draw lessons and showing that anxiety is quite a normal response to our constantly shifting world. Bedlam by Dr. Kenneth Paul Rosenberg delves into our mental health system and how for the seriously mentally ill, it is a very broken system. In Susanna Kaysen's memoir Girl, Interrupted about her stay in a psychiatric hospital in 1967, she explores the system firsthand, describing how mental illness and recovery worked. Or, if you are looking for a holistic way of helping with anxiety or depression, you could read Exercise for Mood and Anxiety, which helps individuals get on a path to getting moving to help self-regulate mood.

Mental Health Awareness Month is meant to focus on the self and on ending the stigma of asking for help. Below are a few resources for those who need help: