Books & resources about personal journeys & memoirs

An Unquiet Mind

By Kay R Jamison

Year: 2011

Subject: Personal Journey

Here the author examines bipolar illness from the dual perspectives of the healer and the healed, revealing both its terrors and the cruel allure that at times prompted her to resist taking medication. An Unquiet Mind is a memoir of enormous candor, vividness, and wisdom – a deeply powerful book that has both transformed and saved lives.

Location

CCL

MHERC

SL

WL

8 Keys to Recovery from an Eating Disorder

By Carolyn Costin

Year: 2011

Subject: Personal Journey

This is no ordinary book on how to overcome an eating disorder. The authors bravely share their unique stories of suffering from and eventually overcoming their own severe eating disorders. Interweaving personal narrative with the perspective of their own therapist-client relationship, their insights bring an unparalleled depth of awareness into just what it takes to successfully beat this challenging and seemingly intractable clinical issue.

Location

CCL

MHERC

WL

Eating in the Light of the Moon

By Anita Johnston

Year: 2000

Subject: Insights and story telling

By weaving practical insights and exercises through a rich tapestry of multicultural myths, ancient legends, and folktales, Anita Johnston helps the millions of women preoccupied with their weight discover and address the issues behind their negative attitudes toward food.

Location

CCL

MHERC

Apple a Day : A Memoir of Love and Recovery from Anorexia

By Emma Woolf

Year: 2013

Subject: Anorexia, Personal journey

At the age of 32, after ten years of hiding from the truth, Emma Woolf finally decided it was time to face the biggest challenge of her life. Addicted to hunger, exercise and control, she was juggling a full-blown eating disorder with a successful career, functioning on an apple a day. A manifesto for the modern generation to stop starving and start living.

Location

CCL

MHERC

WL

Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive

By Stephen Fry

Year: 2005

Subject: DVD. Personal journey

This programme follows Stephen Fry on an emotional but entertaining journey that takes him into the homes of starts and the lives of ordinary people who juggle this illness with their working lives and into the surgeries of psychiatrists and labs of researchers who are trying to help control the condition.

Location

MHERC

Taming The Black Dog

By Bev Aisbett

Year: 2000

Subject: Tips and humour

A simple guide to managing depression. Modelled on Bev’s successful Living with IT, this book, with its unique blend of wit, information and practical tips, will be an invaluable guide for sufferers of depression.

Location

CCL

MHERC

SL

WL

SL

All Blacks Don’t Cry 

By John Kirwan

Year: 2010

Location

CCL

MHERC

SL

WL

HL

We need to talk about Grief: How to be a friend to the one who’s left behind

By Annie Broadbent

Year: 2014

Subject: Personal journey

Talking about death and grief has become something of a modern taboo. Most of us would rather avoid the subject altogether because it makes us feel anxious and awkward. When Annie Broadbent’s mum died, one of the hardest parts of her experience was seeing her friends and extended family paralysed by their fear of saying or doing the wrong thing. Grief is an unavoidable part of life and we will all be called upon at some point to help a friend or loved one cope with the death of someone they love. We Need to Talk About Grief will help you do that. Frustrated and saddened by her own experience, Annie decided to share her story and the stories of others she has met, in order to shed light on the emotions felt by the bereaved and how best to support someone grieving for a loved one. The contributors differ in age, gender and background but all have experienced immediate loss, whether a child, parent, sibling, partner or close friend. Combined with expert advice from key charities, We Need to Talk About Grief will help you navigate the common pitfalls, such as choosing appropriate words of comfort, making practical gestures of help, how to react to crying, when to offer a hug and how often to stay in touch. This moving and enlightening collection of voices from the shores of grief is an invaluable guide that will help anyone wanting to comfort a grieving loved one.

Location

CCL

MHERC

SL

WL

Overcoming Baby Blues: a comprehensive guide to perinatal depression

By Gordon Parker

Year: 2014

Subject: Personal journeys

This book shares intimate stories of mothers’ experiences with depression and other mood problems during pregnancy and their baby’s first year. The stories shine with wisdom, humor, and fortitude. Also included are research-based guidelines on assessing moods, causes of perinatal depression, and effective management strategies. Safety of medications in pregnancy and breastfeeding is covered, as are suggestions for adapting diet and lifestyle to reduce symptoms, and advice for partners.

Location

CCL

MHERC

SL

WL

Shy: a memoir

By Sian Prior

 (CCL & SL)

Year: 2014

Subject: Personal journeys

A Memoir frank, provocative, remarkable in its clarity and beautifully written is a book about unease: about questioning who you are and evading the answer. It is about grief, and abandonment and loss. It is about how the simple word shy belies the complex reality of what that really means.

Location

CCL

SL

WL

HL

How to communicate with someone who has dementia: A guide for carers

By A Caughey

Year: 2018

Subject: Dementia

“When carers and the people they care for engage in good communication, frustrations and stress are minimised. Good communication enables carers to manage most challenges in a positive and respectful way.The book provides practical strategies that are easy to implement when dealing with some commonly encountered problems drawn from real-life experience. It explains what works, what doesn’t, and why. It also shows how to use language effectively, how to implement critical listening skills, and how to interpret body language”–Publisher information.

Location

CCL

SL

WL

HL

Keeping it Real: Love your body, love your life

By M Carr

 (CCL & SL)

Year: 2018

Subject: Overcoming Challenges

Inspirational blogger Makaia Carr left school at 16 and was pregnant with her first child a year later. In her own words, she was a ‘Maori teen mum from the ‘Naki’ who others expected to end up on the DPB. Instead she worked her way up through the fashion

Location

CCL

SL

WL

The Resilient Farmer: Weathering the challenges of life and the land

By D Avery

Year: 2017

Subject: Wellbeing

“‘I had a destroyed farm, a destroyed bank account and destroyed hopes. I couldn’t afford to move, so I decided to make good of what I had.’ And so begins Doug Avery’s story of emotional resilience in the face of what at times seemed a hopeless situation. The Marlborough-based farmer suffered terribly during eight years of drought. His farm was depleted and so was he. Although he didn’t realise it at the time, Doug had severe depression. His story, he says, is common to many in the rural sector who soldier on in isolation, slipping further and further into debt, depression and desperation. In addition to providing people with practical solutions for emotional wellness, he espouses a more sustainable way of farming where soil health and respect for the land is paramount. Doug says the three pillars to successful farming are emotional, financial and environmental resilience. By tackling all three, farmers will prosper and be better placed to weather the inevitable ups and downs that come with farming”–Publisher information.

Location

CCL

MHERC

SL

WL

HL

Tyson & Joey: Two Worlds Collide

By T Watts

Year: 2016

Subject: Anxiety and depression

The story has a self-help thread throughout, which is inspired by the author’s personal experience of living with anxiety and depression. The text conveys the truths that enabled him to rise out of suffering, and to live a life of peace and fulfilment.

Location

MHERC

Black sails White Rabbits: Cancer was the easiest part

By K A Hall

Year: 2015

Subject: Personal Journey

Kevin A. Hall is an Ivy League graduate of Brown University, where he earned bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and French literature. Despite being diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 1989, he went on to become a world-champion Olympic sailor, as well as racing navigator for Emirates Team New Zealand in the 2007 America’s Cup match. A two-time testicular cancer survivor, Hall has spent a successful twenty-five years as a racing navigator, speed testing manager, and sailing performance and racing instruments expert. A brief version of his story was featured in Joel and Ian Gold’s book Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness, as the only nonanonymous case study of a patient with Truman Show delusion. Hall currently lives in Auckland, New Zealand, with his wife and their three children.

Location

CCL

SL

WL

Which Way is Starboard Again? Overcoming Fears & Facing Challenges Sailing the South Pacific

By A Kirtlan

Year: 2015

Subject: Anxiety

Many New Zealanders sail the South Pacific but not many do it with as little boating experience as ‘uncoordinated, impractical, directionally challenged, desk-bound type’ Anna Kirtlan, who says that until she met Captain Paddy and Wildflower II, her idea of rough sailing was ‘taking the Cook Strait ferry with a hangover’. Not only does she have to learn to sail, and navigate, from scratch, she also has to overcome recurrences of the anxiety and panic attacks that plagued her teen and early adult years. Anna’s story is told with humour and perceptive insight into herself and the adventures she shares with Paddy and those they meet along the way — fellow sailors and islanders alike. She is upfront about living with mental illness, about fighting with it and being scared out of her mind at the thought of sailing the high seas, but somehow doing it anyway.

Location

CCL

SL

WL

Out of the Woods

By Brent Williams

Year: 2017

Subject: Depression, an auto-biographical

Out of the Woods is a graphic memoir to help people understand and overcome depression and anxiety. Although the format is an autobiographical comic, it is primarily an educational self-help book, using the author’s own life story

Location

CCL

MHERC

SL

WL

HL

Headlands: New Stories of Anxiety

By Naomi Arnold

Year: 2018

In 2017, Ministry of Health figures showed that one in five New Zealanders sought help for a diagnosed mood or anxiety disorder, and these figures are growing. Headlands : New Stories of Anxiety tells the real, messy story behind these statistics — what anxiety feels like, what causes it, what helps and what doesn’t. These accounts are sometimes raw and confronting, but they all seek to share experiences, remove stigma, offer help or simply shine a light on what anxiety is. The stories in Headlands are told by people from all walks of life: poets, novelists, and journalists, musicians, social workers, and health professionals, and includes new work from Ashleigh Young, Tusiata Avia, Danyl McLauchlan, Selina Tusitala Marsh, Hinemoana Baker and Kirsten McDougall. Edited by journalist Naomi Arnold, Headlands shows that some communities have better access to mental health services than others and it underscores the importance for greater understanding of the condition across the whole of society. It is not a book of solutions nor a self-help guide. Instead, it has been put together for all individuals and whanau affected by anxiety. It’s also for those who are still suffering in silence, in the hope they will see themselves reflected in these pages and understand they are not alone.

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CCL

MHERC

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Been There, Young People’s Stories of Struggle and Hope

By Steve Langley

Year: 2019

This is a collection of stories from 25 NZ young people, with an introduction by youth health specialist Dr Sue Bagshaw, and a poem (to a young patient) and commentary by poet and Youth Clinic GP, Dr Glenn Colquhoun. All the young people have written about a crisis or struggle and what has given them the hope to endure and to pull through. The remarkable openness of their writing means that you will feel anger at the way some young people are treated and admiration for their honesty and courage. You will find their stories sobering, insightful, sensitive and very moving. Many have commented on how valuable it was to them to write their story – to actually detail their experience, many for the first time. This makes it a valuable resource for anyone working with young people, and for young people themselves, many of whom may be facing similar challenges.

Location

CCL

When Breath Becomes Air

By Paul Kalanithi
(SL only) (CCL only)

Year: 2016

At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naive medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality. What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir.

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CCL

SL

WL

HL

With the End in Mind – Dying Death and Wisdom in An Age of Denial

By Kathryn Mannix

(CCL only) (CCL only)

Year: 2017

Dr. Kathryn Mannix shares beautifully crafted stories from a lifetime of caring for the dying. Weaving her own experiences as a caregiver through stories of her patients, their families, and their distinctive lives, Dr. Mannix reacquaints us with the universal, but deeply personal, process of dying. With insightful meditations on life, death, and the space between them, this is a remarkably moving book that sheds a warm light on the beauty, dignity, and profound humanity of life coming to an end.

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CCL

SL

WL