The PTSD Survival Guide for Teens

Your trauma doesn’t need to define you. In The PTSD Survival Guide for Teens, trauma specialist Sheela Raja—along with her teen daughter Jaya Ashrafi—offers evidence-based skills to help you find strength, confidence, and resilience in the aftermath of trauma.

Depression: A Teen’s Guide to Survive and Thrive

Depression: A Teen’s Guide to Survive and Thrive is a guidebook for teenagers who are depressed or at risk for depression. This guide discusses depression and provides guidance on cognitive behavioral therapy principles to help teens take a problem-solving, strategy-based approach to deal with depressed moods, thoughts, and behavior. Intended to serve as an adjunct to therapy, this is a very practical and easy-to-read book that is not overwhelming for teens.

It’s Not a Perfect World, But I’ll Take It

Jennifer Rose is autistic. She’s also a college student who loves reading, writes fan fiction, and wants to be on TV someday. She sees the world a little differently than most people around her. She’s had trouble coping with school, has struggled with bullies and mean girls, but she has also achieved much in the face of adversity. And through it all, with the help of her parents, Jennifer’s learned a few lessons:

#5: Use your dreams to make a difference.
#8: You won’t be perfect at everything, not even the things you do best.
#18: Learn to take jokes, even your dad’s.
#26: Down times will be bouncing up soon . . .
#27: . . . meanwhile, enjoy what you have.
#47: Talk about your feelings, even when it’s hard.

You Are Enough: Your Guide to Body Image and Eating Disorder Recovery

This nonfiction self-help book for young readers with disordered eating and body image problems delivers real talk about eating disorders and body image, tools and information for recovery, and suggestions for dealing with the media messages that contribute so much to disordered eating.

You Are Enough answers questions like:
• What are eating disorders?
• What types of treatment are available for eating disorders?
• What is anxiety?
• How can you relax?
• What is cognitive reframing?
• Why are measurements like BMI flawed and arbitrary?
• What is imposter syndrome?
• How do our role models affect us?
• How do you deal with body changes?
. . . just to name a few.

How To Like Yourself

With all the pressures of school, friends, and dating, you’re especially vulnerable to low self-esteem in your teen years. But often, the biggest threat to your confidence is your own inner critic—whose unrelenting negativity can result in feelings of inadequacy, depression, and anxiety. This must-have guide offers real ways to help you fight back, be kind to yourself, and move forward with confidence.

Inside, you’ll learn the importance of self-forgiveness, accepting your faults, and how to focus on the things that make you awesome! You’ll also learn strategies for defeating the dreaded ICK—the inner critic know-it-all who keeps knocking you down—and how to escape the common thought traps that hold you back from feeling good about yourself.

Zen Teen: 40 Ways to Stay Calm When Life Gets Stressful

n the last decade, studies have reported a drastic rise in teens who experience anxiety, panic, and an inability to cope with the pressures of daily life. As mental health challenges become less stigmatized, young people are more likely than ever before to know how to identify their feelings and ask for help. Even celebrity teen icons like Selena Gomez are “coming out” as anxiety sufferers.

Zen Teen addresses this epidemic with powerful coping mechanisms and creative tools-including two fun quizzes, tons of engaging exercises and a cool playlist-designed for the teenage mind. With topics like “The Unique Genius of You” and “Rock-Star Rituals,” Tanya Carroll Richardson prompts teens to get calm by engaging in mindful tasks like identifying gurus, tapping into warrior energy, mastering meditation, practicing realistic optimism, becoming a self-awareness samurai, learning to surrender, finding a spirit animal, expressing challenging emotions, living with loving-kindness, protecting the planet, and making vision boards that embrace “the Tao of Cool.”

Everything a Band-aid Can’t Fix: A Teen’s Guide to Healing and Dealing With Life

Self-comfort, making peace with grief, dealing with negative thoughts and emotions—these and other tools lie within the pages of “Everything a Band-Aid Can’t Fix” – a guide to help young adults navigate the turbulent passage between being a teenager and being an adult.

Understanding Panic Attacks

Panic attacks happen when people feel intense fear and anxiety. Their heart beats faster, and they may have trouble breathing. Frequent panic attacks are a sign of panic disorder. Understanding Panic Attacks explores what causes panic attacks, how they can affect people’s lives, and how they can be treated.

Me, Myself, and Them

During his second semester at college, Kurt Snyder became convinced that he was about to discover a fabulously important mathematical principle, spending hours lost in daydreams about numbers and symbols. In time, his thoughts took a darker turn, and he became preoccupied with the idea that
cars were following him, or that strangers wanted to harm him. Kurt’s mind had been hijacked by schizophrenia, a severe mental disorder that typically strikes during the late teen or young adult years.
In Me, Myself, and Them, Kurt, now an adult, looks back from the vantage point of recovery and eloquently describes the debilitating changes in thoughts and perceptions that took hold of his life during his teens and twenties. As a memoir, this book is remarkable for its unvarnished look at the slow
and difficult process of coming back from severe mental illness. Yet Kurt’s memoir is only half the story.

(Don’t) Call Me Crazy

Who’s Crazy?

What does it mean to be crazy? Is using the word crazy offensive? What happens when such a label gets attached to your everyday experiences?

In order to understand mental health, we need to talk openly about it. Because there’s no single definition of crazy, there’s no single experience that embodies it, and the word itself means different things—wild? extreme? disturbed? passionate?—to different people.

(Don’t) Call Me Crazy is a conversation starter and guide to better understanding how our mental health affects us every day. Thirty-three writers, athletes, and artists offer essays, lists, comics, and illustrations that explore their personal experiences with mental illness, how we do and do not talk about mental health, help for better understanding how every person’s brain is wired differently, and what, exactly, might make someone crazy.

If you’ve ever struggled with your mental health, or know someone who has, come on in, turn the pages, and let’s get talking.