Informative, diverse, and highly engaging; a much-needed addition to the realm of mental health.
A comprehensive guide highlighting diverse approaches to mental health and illness and featuring stories of teens and adults.
From biological factors to Indigenous healing practices, Siebert’s guide to navigating mental health is incredibly thorough. After opening with personal anecdotes, Siebert covers the history of attitudes toward and treatment of mental illness, contemporary options for treatment, summaries of common diagnoses, paths to maintaining wellness, and confronting shame and stigma. Throughout Siebert highlights real teens and adults from a variety of backgrounds to help readers understand the material being presented. By addressing the impacts of structural and social inequality as well as biological aspects, Siebert has written a well-rounded guide to understanding mental health and healing in a holistic way. Although aimed at young adults and with a focus on the Canadian context, references to international stories and coverage of issues that transcend national lines, such as the impact on mental health of homophobia, substance abuse, and pressures that leads to challenges with body image, make this broadly relevant for all readers seeking to understand mental illness and the importance of mental health. Filled with captivating full-color graphics that provide information in a visually appealing, bite-sized manner, this book serves as a one-stop guide for the busy teen and busier adult.
Informative, diverse, and highly engaging; a much-needed addition to the realm of mental health. (author’s note, resources, glossary, photo credits, index) (Nonfiction. 12-adult)Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4598-1911-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Orca
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.
Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.
“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304413
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
Small but mighty necessary reading.
A miniature manifesto for radical queer acceptance that weaves together the personal and political.
Eli, a cis gay white Jewish man, uses his own identities and experiences to frame and acknowledge his perspective. In the prologue, Eli compares the global Jewish community to the global queer community, noting, “We don’t always get it right, but the importance of showing up for other Jews has been carved into the DNA of what it means to be Jewish. It is my dream that queer people develop the same ideology—what I like to call a Global Queer Conscience.” He details his own isolating experiences as a queer adolescent in an Orthodox Jewish community and reflects on how he and so many others would have benefitted from a robust and supportive queer community. The rest of the book outlines 10 principles based on the belief that an expectation of mutual care and concern across various other dimensions of identity can be integrated into queer community values. Eli’s prose is clear, straightforward, and powerful. While he makes some choices that may be divisive—for example, using the initialism LGBTQIAA+ which includes “ally”—he always makes clear those are his personal choices and that the language is ever evolving.
Small but mighty necessary reading. (resources) (Nonfiction. 14-18)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09368-9
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
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