The therapist will see you now
Explore top therapist-recommended books to improve mental health and well-being. Find the best reads for therapy, self-help, and personal growth curated by professionals.
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She's Come Undone
by Wally Lamb
In this extraordinary coming-of-age odyssey, Wally Lamb invites us to hitch a wild ride on a journey of love, pain, and renewal with the most heartbreakingly comical heroine to come along in years. Meet Dolores Price. She's 13, wise-mouthed but wounded, having bid her childhood goodbye. Stranded in front of her bedroom TV, she spends the next few years nourishing herself with the Mallomars, potato chips, and Pepsi her anxious mother supplies. When she finally orbits into young womanhood at 257 pounds, Dolores is no stronger and life is no kinder. But this time she's determined to rise to the occasion and give herself one more chance before she really goes under.
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Bell Jar
by Sylvia Plath
A Special Paperback Edition to Commemorate the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Publication of Sylvia Plath's Remarkable Novel Sylvia Plath's shocking, realistic, and intensely emotional novel about a woman falling into the grip of insanity Esther Greenwood is brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under—maybe for the last time. In her acclaimed and enduring masterwork, Sylvia Plath brilliantly draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that her insanity becomes palpably real, even rational—as accessible an experience as going to the movies. A deep penetration into the darkest and most harrowing corners of the human psyche, The Bell Jar is an extraordinary accomplishment and a haunting American classic.
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Girl, Interrupted
by Susanna Kaysen
30th ANNIVERSARY EDITION • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist she'd never seen before, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen was put in a taxi and sent to McLean Hospital. Her memoir of the next two years is a "poignant, honest ... triumphantly funny ... and heartbreaking story" (The New York Times Book Review). WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR The ward for teenage girls in the McLean psychiatric hospital was as renowned for its famous clientele—Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor, and Ray Charles—as for its progressive methods of treating those who could afford its sanctuary. Kaysen's memoir encompasses horror and razor-edged perception while providing vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers. It is a brilliant evocation of a "parallel universe" set within the kaleidoscopically shifting landscape of the late sixties. Girl, Interrupted is a clear-sighted, unflinching document that gives lasting and specific dimension to our definitions of sane and insane, mental illness and recovery.
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Undercurrents
by Martha Manning
Through her diary entries therapist Martha Manning tells how depression transformed her from a happy, healthy, and successful person to a suicidal sleepwalker and how electroconvulsive therapy helped her recover.
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A Heart of Stone
by Renate Dorrestein
In a striking coming-of-age novel, a young Dutch woman living in suburban Amsterdam re-examines her past to understand why the heartbreak of her twelfth birthday still haunts her. Reprint.
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On the Couch
by Alisa Kwitney
After going for more than a year without a date -- a record in New York City -- Marlowe Riddle has finally met a broodingly sexy, sharply intelligent man who is clearly interested in making more than polite conversation. The only problem: Joseph Kain is an NYPD detective clearly under the mistaken impression that Marlowe is a call girl. But while Marlowe does take money for spending time with strangers in her expensive Upper West Side apartment, she's a psychologist -- not Manhattan's answer to the Mayflower Madam! A fact she has no intention of telling Joe ... at least not until she finishes her research project on the "Behavioral Effects of Disguising Identity." But Marlowe's not the only one trying to secretively gain information ... and it's becoming increasingly unclear who is seducing whom. Because sometimes the only way to learn what a man really wants ... is to get him on the couch.
