Reading Well for mental health provides helpful information and support for managing common mental health conditions, or dealing with difficult feelings and experiences.
All these books from The Reading Agency are available to borrow with your library card.
Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World
Mark Williams and Danny Penman
Authoritative, beautifully written and much-loved by its readers, Mindfulness reveals a set of simple yet powerful practices that you can incorporate into daily life to break the cycle of anxiety, stress unhappiness and exhaustion. It promotes the kind of happiness that gets into your bones and allows you to meet the worst that life throws at you with new courage.
By investing just a few minutes each day, this classic guide to mindfulness will put you back in control of your life once again.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT): Your Toolkit to Modify Mood, Overcome Obstructions and Improve Your Life
Elaine Iljon Foreman and Clair Pollard
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a branch of therapy widely regarded as effective in curing or alleviating numerous disorders, from anorexia to post-traumatic stress disorder. This book focuses on how you can use CBT’s measured and results-driven approach to improve your life.
Living Life to the Full: Key Life Skills to Change Your Life
Chris Williams
Wanting to feel happier, find time for you, overcome problems and keep calm in the face of difficulty? This book teaches you powerful wellbeing strategies based on the tried and trusted cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) approach.
Stress Control: A Mind, Body, Life Approach to Boosting Your Wellbeing
Jim White
Stress is part and parcel of life. We all get it. Think of blood pressure. If you are alive, you have blood pressure. If you are alive, you have stress. If your blood pressure gets too high, you should do something about it. The same is true with stress and this book will help you to control it. Stress can be a mixture of anxiety, depression, panic feelings, poor sleep, low self-confidence, low self-esteem and a poor sense of wellbeing. It is one of the most common problems in the world today. But controlling your stress doesn’t have to mean expensive therapy or a long waiting list for a referral to a service. This book will teach you to become your own therapist.
Mind Over Mood: Change How You Feel by Changing the Way You Think
Dennis Greenberger
Discover simple yet powerful steps you can take to overcome emotional distress—and feel happier, calmer, and more confident. Written by two clinical psychologists, this manual shows you how to improve your life using cognitive therapy. Step-by-step worksheets teach you specific skills that have helped thousands of people conquer depression, panic attacks, anxiety, anger, guilt, and relationship problems.
The CBT Handbook
Pamela Myles-Hooton and Roz Shafran
CBT is widely recommended nowadays in the NHS for the treatment of emotional and psychological problems, such as depression, low self-esteem, low mood, chronic anxiety, stress or out-of-control anger. This thorough yet easy-to-read general self-help guide is a must-have for anyone experiencing these common problems. Based on the popular and proven therapy CBT, it is written by two of the UK’s leading experts in the field of CBT.
Manage Your Mood: How to Use Behavioural Activation Techniques to Overcome Depression
David Veale and Rob Willson
This book looks at behavioural activation as an effective technique in managing depression. By analysing, challenging and changing behaviours such as avoidance, ruminating and excessive worrying, the sufferer can reinforce their positive experiences and decrease the behaviour which reinforces their depression.
The Sleep Book: How to Sleep Well Every Night
Guy Meadows
Using a blend of mindfulness and new ACT therapy techniques, Dr Guy shares his unique five-week plan to cure your sleep problem whether it’s a few restless nights or a lifetime of insomnia. Most people who have trouble sleeping invest a huge amount of time, effort and money into fixing the problem, but Dr Guy has discovered the secret lies not in what you do, but what you learn not to do. In fact, as you will have discovered, the more frustrated you become only serves to push sleep further away.
Overcoming Social Anxiety & Shyness
Gillian Butler
In this fully revised and updated edition, Dr Gillian Butler provides a practical, easy-to-use self-help course which will be invaluable for those suffering from all degrees of social anxiety. These self-help guides use effective therapeutic techniques to treat long-standing and disabling conditions, both psychological and physical. Many guides in this series are recommended by the UK Department of Health under the Books on Prescription scheme.
Overcoming Low Self-Esteem
Melanie Fennell
Melanie Fennell’s acclaimed and bestselling self-help guide will help you to understand your low self-esteem and break out of the vicious circle of distress, unhelpful behaviour and self-destructive thinking. Using practical techniques from cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), this text will help you learn the art of self-acceptance and so transform your sense of yourself for the better.
Overcoming Anger and Irritability
William Davies
Constant irritability or flashes of bad temper can cause difficulties in relationships with friends, family or colleagues and leave us feeling unhappy and exhausted. This fully updated and revised edition of William Davies’ bestselling title is for anyone struggling to control their rage and regretting inappropriate reactions. It explains clearly what provokes anger and what we can do to prevent it.
Overcoming Anxiety
Helen Kennerley
This ever-popular guide offers a self-help programme, written by one of the UK’s leading authorities on anxiety and based on CBT, for those suffering from anxiety problems. A whole range of anxieties and fears are explained, from panic attacks and phobias to obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and generalised anxiety. It includes an introduction to the nature of anxiety and stress and a complete self-help programme with monitoring sheets based on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.
Overcoming Depression
Paul Gilbert
This fully revised third edition has been extensively updated and rewritten to reflect over ten years of new research on understanding and treating depression, particularly the importance of developing compassionate ways of thinking, behaving and feeling. It contains helpful case studies and new, easy-to-follow, step-by-step suggestions and exercises to help you understand your depression and lift your mood.
Overcoming Worry and Generalised Anxiety Disorder
Mark Freeston and Kevin Meares
Up to 44 in every 1000 adults suffer from a condition known as generalised anxiety disorder. This is much more than the normal worrying we all do – it can be a debilitating disorder leading to significant personal and social problems and sometimes financial loss. Using established and proven CBT techniques, expert clinicians Kevin Meares and Mark Freeston help readers to understand that it is their propensity to worry, not the multitude of problems they worry about, that is the root of the problem.
Overcoming Panic
Vijaya Manicavasagar and Derrick Silove
Do you sometimes feel overwhelmed by feelings of panic that seem to come from nowhere and yet feel terrifyingly real? Do you avoid certain situations because you think you’ll experience a panic attack? If so, this step-by-step self-help course can give you the necessary skills to overcome and prevent such attacks and the associated agoraphobia.
Panic attacks are recognised as one of the most serious forms of anxiety, and can become disabling. This guide explains both the physical and emotional symptoms, the common causes of this ‘fear of fear’, and how to master anxiety management techniques.
Overcoming Health Anxiety
David Veale and Rob Willson
Many of us have a tendency to worry unnecessarily about our health. This can be worse in a time of global panic about pandemics. For some, the anxiety becomes chronic, and they may spend many hours checking for symptoms, seeking reassurance from others, surfing the internet for information about different diseases, or repeatedly visiting the doctor.
Health anxiety can be very successfully treated with cognitive behavioural therapy – the approach taken in this self-help guide. Using a structured, step-by-step approach, the authors explain how the problem develops, how to recognise what feeds it and how to develop effective methods of dealing with it.
Overcoming Mood Swings
Jan Scott
Most of us know about extreme highs or lows. For some people, however, emotional extremes can seriously disrupt our lives, either because they happen too frequently or because the mood swings are intense and accompanied by other symptoms of depression or mania, such as changes in energy and activity levels.
This self-help manual for those who have experienced mood swings gives details on tried and tested techniques that will help people identify and manage their moods more effectively. Background information on depression and mania is also provided.
Coping With Depression
Lee Brosan
Depression is the predominant mental health condition worldwide, affecting millions of people each year. But it can be treated effectively with cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT).
Written by experienced practitioners, this introductory book explains what depression is and how it makes you feel. It will help you to understand your symptoms and is ideal as an immediate coping strategy and as a preliminary to fuller therapy.
Coping With Anxiety
Brenda Hogan
Anxiety is one of the most common mental health conditions worldwide, affecting millions of people each year. But it can be treated effectively with cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT).
Written by experienced practitioners, this introductory book can help you if anxiety has become a problem. It explains what anxiety is and how it makes you feel when it becomes unmanageable or lasts for long periods of time. It will help you to understand your symptoms and is ideal as an immediate coping strategy and as a preliminary to fuller therapy.
Coping With Grief
Sue Morris
Grief is a natural reaction to loss but in some cases it can be devastating, preventing you from moving on in your life and affecting your relationships and work. This fully updated self-help guide offers an examination and explanation of the grieving process and outlines clinically-proven strategies, based on cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), to help you adjust to life without a loved one.
The Sheldon Short Guide to Phobias and Panic
Kevin Gournay
For many people, life is made intolerable by phobias. Common fears may range from crowded places to a fear of spiders or blood, but, the basic underlying mechanism is the same – acute anxiety. This book looks at how to tackle both specific phobias and the anxiety which causes such disproportionate fear, and covers obsessive-compulsive disorder, social phobia, generalized anxiety state, and panic disorder with agoraphobia.
Break Free from OCD: Overcoming Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Kevin Gournay
Are you plagued by obsessive thoughts, rituals or routines? Would you like to regain control over your behaviour and cast your fears aside?
Whether you are compelled to wash your hands more and more thoroughly or feel the need to keep checking that you’ve turned off appliances, obsessive worries can be a drain on daily life. However, you don’t need to suffer any more. This practical guide, written by three leading cognitive behavioural therapy experts, enables you to make sense of your symptoms, and gives a simple plan to help you conquer OCD.
Overcoming Binge Eating
Christopher G. Fairburn
This trusted bestseller provides all the information needed to understand binge eating and bring it under control, whether you are working with a therapist or on your own. Clear, step-by-step guidelines show you how to: overcome the urge to binge; gain control over what and when you eat; break free of strict dieting and other bad habits; establish stable, healthy eating patterns; improve your body image and reduce the risk of relapse.
This fully updated second edition incorporates important advances in the understanding and treatment of eating disorders.
Body Image Problems and Body Dysmorphic Disorder: The Definitive Treatment and Recovery Approach
Lauren Callaghan
From the heart and soul of mental health sufferer Chloe Catchpole, and the expert minds of the talented, clinical psychologists, Lauren Callaghan and Dr Annemarie O’Connor, this book is divided into two helpful, cohesive parts. Detailed from the separate perspectives of a sufferer and the psychologists is an insight into mental health recovery that sufferers can really relate to.
Getting Better Bite by Bite: A Survival Kit for Sufferers of Bulimia Nervosa and Binge Eating Disorders
Ulrike Schmidt, Janet Treasure and June Alexander
The book provides step-by-step guidance for change based on solid research. The use of everyday language, stimulating contemporary case study story-telling and evocative illustrations in Bite by Bite provide encouragement, hope and new perspectives for all readers.
This new edition maintains the essence of the original book, while updating its content for today’s readers, drawing on the latest knowledge of the biology and psychology of bulimia and its treatment.
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