IDHA organizers compiled the below library of essential resources (books, essay collections, films, poetry, and art) to deepen our collective understanding of Transformative Mental Health.
Resources are sorted alphabetically by the author’s last name (first author, if there are several). Click the buttons below to sort by category. This list is being updated on an ongoing basis; please email us at contact@idha-nyc.org with any recommended additions!
- All Resources
- Critical Psychiatry
- Mental Health and Social Justice
- Transformative Modalities
- Narratives of Lived Experience
Critical Psychiatry
Book
Doctors of Deception: What They Don't Want You to Know about Shock Treatment
Linda Andre
Through the investigation of court records, medical research, FDA archives, and other primary sources, this book shows that claims of safety and efficacy made by doctors who promote and profit from ECT are not supported by science or evidence. The author documents the struggles of these former patients and their allies who have worked for over thirty years to inform others about the dangers of ECT, and includes vivid firsthand accounts of its permanent adverse effects on memory and cognition. Read more →
Critical Psychiatry
Book
The Radical Therapist: The Radical Therapist Collective
Jerome Angel
This book provides a historical look back at the dawning of the American Patients Rights era, and helped provide the foundation upon which the Patient's Rights movement of the early 1970's was built. It advocates for change in the way that medical doctors and patients interacted at the time. Read more →
Narratives of Lived Experience
Book
Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us
Rachel Aviv
Rachel Aviv raises fundamental questions about how we understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress. Drawing on deep, original reporting as well as unpublished journals and memoirs, Aviv writes about people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are. Animated by a profound sense of empathy, Aviv’s exploration is refracted through her own account of living in a hospital ward at the age of six and meeting a fellow patient with whom her life runs parallel—until it no longer does.
Read more →
Narratives of Lived Experience
Book
Ten Days in a Madhouse
Nelly Bly
This book was initially published as a series of articles for the New York World, and later compiled into a book in 1887. It was based on articles written while Bly was on an undercover assignment for the New York World, feigning insanity at a women's boarding house, so as to be involuntarily committed to an insane asylum.
Read more →
Transformative Modalities
Book
Emancipatory Perpsectives on Madness: Psychological, Social and Spiritual Approaches
Marie Brown and Robin S. Brown (Editors)
This collection offers a diverse range of perspectives that seek to find meaning in madness. Although an appreciation for the role of trauma has been critical in expanding the ways in which we view madness, an emphasis of this kind may nevertheless continue to perpetuate a subtle form of reductivism—madness continues to be understood as the product of a deficit. In seeking to move beyond causal-reductivism, this book explores a variety of perspectives on the question of finding inherent meaning in madness and extreme states. Read more →
Critical Psychiatry
Book
Women and Madness
Phyllis Chesler
This definitive book was the first to address critical questions about women and mental health. Combining patient interviews with an analysis of women's roles in history, society, and myth Chesler concludes that there is a terrible double standard when it comes to women's psychology. She addresses head-on many of the most relevant issues to women and mental health today, including eating disorders, social acceptance of antidepressants, addictions, sexuality, postpartum depression, and more. Read more →
Narratives of Lived Experience
Book
Depression: A Public Feeling
Ann Cvetkovich
Ann Cvetkovich combines memoir and critical essay in search of ways of writing about depression as a cultural and political phenomenon that offer alternatives to medical models. She describes her own experience of the professional pressures, creative anxiety, and political hopelessness that led to intellectual blockage while she was finishing her dissertation and writing her first book. Building on the insights of the memoir, she considers the idea that feeling bad constitutes the lived experience of neoliberal capitalism. Read more →
Mental Health and Social Justice
Book
Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement
Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (Editors)
Transformative justice seeks to solve the problem of violence at the grassroots level, without relying on punishment, incarceration, or policing. In this collection, a diverse group of authors focuses on concrete and practical forms of redress and accountability, assessing existing practices and marking paths forward. Read more →
Transformative Modalities
Book
The Hero's Journey®: Path to Well-being
JoAnn Dorio Burton and Kristin Becker
The Hero's Journey®: Path to Well-being, based on the work of Joseph Campbell, uses film clips, art, poetry, and self-reflection questions, to provide readers the opportunity to explore their life journeys. To purchase a copy of the workbook please email JoAnn: Contact →
Critical Psychiatry
Book
Native American Postcolonial Psychology
Eduardo and Bonnie Duran (Editors)
This book presents a theoretical discussion of problems and issues encountered in the Native American community. Native American cosmology and metaphor are used extensively in order to deal with specific problems such as alcoholism, suicide, family, and community problems. The authors discuss what it means to present material from the perspective of a people who have legitimate ways of knowing and conceptualizing reality and show that it is imperative to understand intergenerational trauma and internalized oppression in order to understand the issues facing Native Americans today. Read more →
Critical Psychiatry
Book
Prisoners of Psychiatry
Bruce Ennis
When Bruce Ennis began his inquiry into the workings of New York State's mental hospitals, he expected to uncover abuses of the system. Before long, however, he concluded that the system itself was an abuse. His book argues that involuntary hospitalization is an unjustifiable form of coerscion whose purpose is to rid the community of troublesome or unproductive eccentrics—most of them poor, black, old, or all three. His book is report on some of those cases, their results and their implications. It is also a cogent polemic against forced confinement of the mentally ill. Read more →
Narratives of Lived Experience
Book (Poetry)
Ode to Lithium
Shira Erlichman
This book of poetry pens a love letter to lithium. With inventiveness, compassion, and humor, she thrusts us into a world of unconventional praise. From an unexpected encounter with her grandmother’s ghost, to a bubble bath with Bjӧrk, to her plumber’s confession that he, too, has bipolar, Shira writes necessary odes to self-acceptance, resilience, and the jagged path toward healing. Read more →
Critical Psychiatry
Book
Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault examines the archeology of madness in the West from 1500 to 1800 - from the late Middle Ages, when insanity was still considered part of everyday life and fools and lunatics walked the streets freely, to the time when such people began to be considered a threat, asylums were first built, and walls were erected between the "insane" and the rest of humanity. Read more →
Critical Psychiatry
Book
Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates
Erving Goffman
Asylums is an analysis of life in "total institutions" -- closed worlds such as prisons, army training camps, naval vessels, boarding schools, monastaries, nursing homes and mental hospitals -- where the inmates are regimented, surrounded by other inmates, and unable to leave the premises. Read more →
Narratives of Lived Experience
Book
We've Been Too Patient: Voices from Radical Mental Health
L.D. Green and Kelechi Ubozoh (Editors)
While much has been written about the systemic problems of our mental-health care system, this book gives voice to those with personal experience of psychiatric miscare often excluded from the discussion, like people of color and LGBTQ+ communities. It is dedicated to finding working alternatives to the “Mental Health Industrial Complex” and shifting the conversation from mental illness to mental health. Read more →
Transformative Modalities
Book
Spiritual Emergency: When Personal Transformation Becomes a Crisis
Christina and Stanislav Grof (Editors)
In this book, foremost psychologists, psychiatrists, and spiritual teachers address the following questions: What is spiritual emergency? What is the relationship between spirituality, “madness,” and healing? What forms does spiritual emergency take? What are the pitfalls — and promises — of spiritual practice? How can people in spiritual emergency be assisted by family, friends, and professionals? Read more →
Mental Health and Social Justice
Book
The Politics of Trauma
Staci Haines
This book invites readers to look beyond the body and mind to consider the social, political and economic roots of trauma. Conditions such as racism, environmental degradation, sexism, and poverty are more than illnesses of society, they are also the source of physical, mental, and emotional disease. Author and practitioner Staci Haines offers a new politicized somatics for therapists and social activists who share a common goal of alleviating suffering and improving life. Read more →
Narratives of Lived Experience
Book (Poetry)
Madness and a Bit of Hope
Safiya Henderson-Holmes
Poems that deal with homelessness, city life, family, women's issues, and the African-American experience. Read more →
Critical Psychiatry
Book
Trauma and Recovery
Judith Herman
When Trauma and Recovery was first published in 1992, it was hailed as a groundbreaking work. In the intervening years, Herman’s volume has changed the way we think about and treat traumatic events and trauma victims. Read more →
Critical Psychiatry
Book
Trauma and Madness in Mental Health Services
Noel Hunter
How do survivors of child abuse, bullying, chronic oppression and discrimination, and other developmental traumas adapt to such unimaginable situations? It is taken for granted that experiences such as hearing voices, altered states of consciousness, dissociative states, lack of trust, and intense emotions are inherently problematic. But what does the evidence actually show? And how much do we still need to learn? Read more →
Narratives of Lived Experience
Book
The Hospital Always Wins
Issa Ibrahim
Written with great verve and immediacy, The Hospital Always Wins paints a detailed picture of a broken mental health system but also reveals the power of art, when nurtured in a benign environment, to provide a resource for recovery. Ultimately this is a story about survival and atonement through creativity and courage against almost insurmountable odds. Read more →
Transformative Modalities
Book
Power Threat Meaning Framework
Lucy Johnstone and Mary Boyle
The Power Threat Meaning Framework has the potential to take us beyond medicalisation and diagnostic assumptions. It puts forward alternative ways of thinking about a range of fundamental issues including: What kinds of theoretical frameworks and assumptions are appropriate for understanding emotional distress, unusual experiences and troubled and troubling behaviour? What research methods could be used and what counts as evidence? How could the results of research be interpreted? What is the relationship between personal distress and its wider social, material and cultural contexts? How can we centre people’s lived experiences and the meanings that shape them? Read more →
Transformative Modalities
Art Piece
Open in Emergency
Mimi Khúc (Editor)
Open in Emergency is an arts and humanities intervention to decolonize mental health. The community effort collectively asks what Asian American unwellness looks like and how to tend to that unwellness. This special issue provided a space for artists, scholars, organizers, and community to explore structures of care that we have already been building – and to dream into being new structures, new tools, to better care for our collective needs. Read more →
Critical Psychiatry
Book
The Divided Self
R.D. Laing
Dr. Laing's first purpose is to make madness and the process of going mad comprehensible. In this, with case studies of schizophrenic patients, he succeeds brilliantly, but he does more: through a vision of sanity and madness as 'degrees of conjunction and disjunction between two persons where the one is sane by common consent' he offers a rich existential analysis of personal alienation. Read more →
Mental Health and Social Justice
Book
Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Care Work is a mapping of access as radical love, a celebration of the work that sick and disabled queer/people of color are doing to find each other and to build power and community, and a tool kit for everyone who wants to build radically resilient, sustainable communities of liberation where no one is left behind. Read more →
Transformative Modalities
Book
Waking The Tiger: Healing Trauma
Peter Levine
This book normalizes the symptoms of trauma and the steps needed to heal them. People are often traumatized by seemingly ordinary experiences. The reader is taken on a guided tour of the subtle, yet powerful impulses that govern our responses to overwhelming life events. To do this, it employs a series of exercises that help us focus on bodily sensations. Through heightened awareness of these sensations trauma can be healed. Read more →
Mental Health and Social Justice
Book (Essays)
Medicine Stories
Aurora Levins-Moales
Aurora Levins Morales weaves together insights and lessons learned over a lifetime of activism to offer a new theory of social justice. Calling for a politics of integrity that recognizes the complicated wholeness of individual and collective lives, Levins Morales delves among the interwoven roots of multiple oppressions, exposing connections, crafting strategies, and uncovering the wellsprings of resilience and joy. Throughout 28 essays, she exposes the structures and mechanisms that silence voices and divide movements. Read more →
Critical Psychiatry
Book
Narrative Psychiatry: How Stories Can Shape Clinical Practice
Bradley Lewis
Nothing short of a call to rework the psychiatric profession, Narrative Psychiatry advocates taking the inherently narrative-centered patient-psychiatrist relationship to its logical conclusion: making the story a central aspect of treatment. Read more →
Critical Psychiatry
Film
Take These Broken Wings
Daniel Mackler
This feature-length documentary film by director and former psychotherapist Daniel Mackler shows that people can recover fully from schizophrenia without psychiatric medication. According to most of the mental health field, and of course the pharmaceutical industry, this is not possible. The film centers on the lives of two women – heroes of mine – who both recovered from severe schizophrenia. The film traces the roots of their schizophrenia to childhood trauma and details their successful psychotherapy with gifted clinicians. Read more →
Mental Health and Social Justice
Book
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
adrienne maree brown
Inspired by Octavia Butler's explorations of our human relationship to change, Emergent Strategy is radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help designed to shape the futures we want to live. Rather than steel ourselves against change, this book invites us to feel, map, assess, and learn from the swirling patterns around us in order to better understand and influence them as they happen. This is a resolutely materialist “spirituality” based equally on science and science fiction, a visionary incantation to transform that which ultimately transforms us. Read more →
Transformative Modalities
Book
When the Body Says No: Understanding the Stress-Disease Connection
Gabor Mate
This book explores the role of the mind-body link in conditions and diseases such as arthritis, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, IBS, and multiple sclerosis. Draws on medical research and the author’s clinical experience as a family physician Read more →
Transformative Modalities
Book
Psychology and the Human Dilemma
Rollo May
Whether reflecting on war, psychology, or the ideas of existentialist thinkers such as Sartre and Kierkegaard, Dr. May everywhere enlarges our outlook on how people can develop creatively within the human predicament. Read more →
Critical Psychiatry
Book
Healing the Mind through the Power of Story
Lewis Mehl-Madrona
Dr. Mehl-Madrona shows what mental health care could be. He explains that within a narrative psychiatry model of mental illness, people are not defective, requiring drugs to “fix” them. What needs “fixing” is the ineffective stories they have internalized and succumbed to about how they should live in the world. Drawing on traditional stories from cultures around the world, Dr. Mehl-Madrona helps his patients re-story their lives. Read more →
Narratives of Lived Experience
Film
Drunk on Too Much Life
Michelle Melles
An intimate documentary that follows the filmmaker, her husband, and their 21-year-old-daughter’s journey from locked-down psych ward and countless medications towards expansive worlds of creativity, connection and greater meaning. On her journey of self-discovery, Corrina, the filmmaker and her family learn that madness has meaning that goes far beyond brain chemistry and recovery is not a straight path to being cured but a crooked and bumpy journey and series of small awakenings.
A grass-roots celebration of holistic care through self-awareness, supportive communities and peer-support, Drunk on Too Much Life shows how lasting healing and transformation happens on each of these levels simultaneously: in ourselves, our families, our communities, and our society at large.
Available for streaming (DVD to come) →
Critical Psychiatry
Book
On Shame and the Search for Identity
Helen Merrell Lynd
In the treatment of personality, researchers and writers have overlooked the importance of the concept shame. If identity is to be dealt with adequately a consideration of shame must be included, since the isolating, alienating and incommunicative effects of shame bring identity into such clear focus. Read more →
Mental Health and Social Justice
Book
The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease
Metzl, Jonathan
A psychiatrist and cultural critic tells the shocking story of how schizophrenia became the diagnostic term overwhelmingly applied to African American protesters at Ionia -- for political reasons as well as clinical ones. Metzl shows how associations between schizophrenia and blackness emerged during the tumultuous decades of the 1960s and 1970s -- and he provides a cautionary tale of how anxieties about race continue to impact doctor-patient interactions in our seemingly postracial America. Read more →
Narratives of Lived Experience
Book
Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self
Alice Miller
Far too many of us had to learn as children to hide our own feelings, needs, and memories skillfully in order to meet our parents' expectations and win their "love." Alice Miller writes, "When I used the word 'gifted' in the title, I had in mind neither children who receive high grades in school nor children talented in a special way. I simply meant all of us who have survived an abusive childhood thanks to an ability to adapt even to unspeakable cruelty by becoming numb.... Without this 'gift' offered us by nature, we would not have survived." Read more →
Critical Psychiatry
Book
Decolonizing Global Mental Health: The Psychiatrization of the Majority World
China Mills
The book argues that it is imperative to explore what counts as evidence within Global Mental Health, and seeks to de-familiarize current ‘Western’ conceptions of psychology and psychiatry using postcolonial theory. It leads us to wonder whether we should call for equality in global access to psychiatry, whether everyone should have the right to a psychotropic citizenship and whether mental health can, or should, be global. Read more →
Narratives of Lived Experience
Book
The Lives They Left Behind: Suitcases from a State Hospital Attic
Darby Penney and Peter Stastny
When Willard State Hospital closed its doors in 1995, after operating as one of New York State's largest mental institutions for over 120 years, a forgotten attic filled with suitcases belonging to former patients was discovered. Using the possessions found in these suitcases along with institutional records and doctors' notes from patient sessions, Darby Penney and Peter Stastny were able to reconstruct the lives of ten patients who resided at Willard during the first half of the twentieth century. Read more →
Transformative Modalities
Essay
Setting an Intention for Decolonizing Practice and Justice-Doing: Social Justice Activism in Community Work and Therapy
Vikki Reynolds
The work of this writing is to set an intention for an un-settling and decolonizing practice, especially for settler workers. I’m offering an entrance into a stance where we work to deliver justice to people and to do more than simply not oppress people. There is an invitation to take up the activist project to transform the social contexts in which suffering and oppression occur and to do this in ways led by Indigenous people and accountable to the communities we serve. Read more →
Narratives of Lived Experience
Book
Living with Voices: 50 Stories of Recovery
Marius Romme, Sandra Escher, Jacqui Dillon, and Dirk Corstens (Editors)
All the people in this book describe their recovery; how they now accept their voices as personal, and how they have learnt to cope with them and have changed their relationship with them. They have discovered that their voices are not a sign of madness but a reaction to problems in their lives that they couldn’t cope with, and they have found that there is a relationship between the voices and their life history, that the voices talk about problems that they haven’t dealt with – and that they therefore make sense. Read more →
Mental Health and Social Justice
Book
Turn This World Inside Out: The Emergence of Nurturance Culture
Nora Samaran
This book presents Nurturance Culture as the opposite of rape culture and suggests how alternative models of care and accountability―different from “call-outs,” which are often rooted in the politics of shame and guilt―can move toward inverting cultures of dominance and systems of oppression. Read more →
Critical Psychiatry
Book
Search for a Method
Jean-Paul Sartre
From one of the 20th century's most profound philosophers and writers, comes a thought provoking essay that seeks to reconcile Marxism with existentialism. Exploring the complicated relationship the two philosophical schools of thought have with one another, Sartre supposes that the two are in fact compatible and complimentary towards one another, with poignant analysis and reasoning. Read more →
Narratives of Lived Experience
Book (Poetry)
madness
sam sax
sam sax explores and explodes the linkages between desire, addiction, and the history of mental health. These brave, formally dexterous poems examine antiquated diagnoses and procedures from hysteria to lobotomy; offer meditations on risky sex; and take up the poet’s personal and family histories as mental health patients and practitioners. madness attempts to build a queer lineage out of inherited language and cultural artifacts. Read more →
Narratives of Lived Experience
Essays and Art
Headcase: LGBTQ Writers & Artists on Mental Health and Wellness
Stephanie Schroeder and Teresa Theophano (Editors)
This collection shares personal essays, poems, and visual artwork expressing the experience of living with a mental health issue as a member of the LGBTQ community. Read more →
Critical Psychiatry
Book
The Myth of Mental Illness
Thomas Szasz
Thomas Szasz's classic book revolutionized thinking about the nature of the psychiatric profession and the moral implications of its practices. Read more →
Narratives of Lived Experience
Photo Essay
The Color of My Mind
Dior Vargas
This photo essay is based on the viral online photo series entitled the "People Of Color and Mental Illness Photo Project" launched in 2014. The project started as a result of Dior noticing an unfortunate trend in the homogenization and misrepresentation of mental health conditions and the people affected by them. Now, this photo essay seeks to highlight the diversity in the mental health community. The project visually depicts the experiences of 34 individuals as they discuss their struggles, strengths, and lessons learned while living life as a person of color with a mental illness. Read more →
Critical Psychiatry
Book
Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche
Ethan Watters
For millennia, local beliefs in different cultures have shaped the experience of mental illness into endless varieties. Crazy Like Us documents how American interventions have discounted and worked to change those indigenous beliefs. Over the last decades, mental illnesses popularized in America have been spreading across the globe with the speed of contagious diseases. Watters brings home the unsettling conclusion that the virus is us: As we introduce Americanized ways of treating mental illnesses, we are in fact spreading the diseases. Read more →
Critical Psychiatry
Presentation
The Return to the Sacred Path: Reflections on the Development of Historical Trauma Healing
Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart
This presentation reviews historical trauma, historical unresolved grief, and historical trauma response definitions
and concepts. It also introduces a process of developing historical trauma theory &
the historical trauma and unresolved grief. Read more →
Mental Health and Social Justice
Essay
Nigga Neurosis
Damon Young
Damon Young discusses with a condition he calls "Nigga Neurosis" — the perpetual state of wondering if, and how, racism is involved in certain experiences. Read more →