If you are concerned with what other people think about you, know this and set yourself free: If they find you intelligent, stupid, ugly, or average, that has nothing to do with you.

I will be forever grateful to Bryony for her ability to be so open and honest and for making me feel like I'm not the only person in the world who feels like this. I'm much more dubious about this peculiar neoliberal idea that individual stories create systemic change - really?

EQUIPPED WITH DISCUSSION QUESTIONS, THIS STORY PROVIDES A CREATIVE, HONEST AND INTERACTIVE WAY TO INSTILL DIGNITY AND RESPECT FOR ALL PEOPLE. It certainly got me thinking about mental health and how generalisable advice about it can reasonably be. While it doesn't help to beat yourself up for not being normal, surely attempts to work on your mental health are about trying to get your brain to behave more normally? I enjoyed the explanation behind those pesky thoughts that drag me down and it's uplifting to know there are resources and people out there who want to help.

I have saved it in its entirety onto my phone’s library so when things are feeling too much, I can listen to any chapter I need to, to remind myself that I can get through whatever emotion I am feeling and I’m not alone. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. She is co-author of the book Living on Automatic: How Emotional Conditioning Shapes Our Lives and Relationships. Such no-filter honesty, goes a long way to towards satisfying the (quite understandable) impatience for respite, that so often prevails over and above the need for ‘answers’…when clutching at paperback life rafts from the anxiety trenches!This book is organised as a self help guide, the way it is written allows the reader to be able to pull out relevant bits to themselves and therefore hopefully be able to implement the tips in to their own lives. g. ‘try this breathing technique’ while in the previous acknowledging that breathing techniques are not always helpful. If you feel like the past year has thrown your mental health off it’s usual course or taken you back a few (thousand) steps on your recovery, then I think you’ll find Bryony’s words and her reflections very useful. p>Read about how we’ll protect and use your data in our Privacy Notice.

What I love about this book is the fact there is so much information on how and where to get help and support which is very much needed in the world right now. Perhaps it's the shyness and introversion, but I'm not comfortable sharing a lot of personal details of my mental health with total strangers.I borrowed No Such Thing As Normal: What My Mental Illness Has Taught Me About Mental Wellness from the library on impulse as it includes a chapter on lockdown and the pandemic. However, unfortunately, this book lacked the originality, pizazz and personality that Gordon had in Mad Girl. I found the frequent pull-quotes to be distracting and had to stop reading them since they are already in the text.