The Best Books About Mental and Emotional Health

This is obviously an incredibly wide and nebulous category (I also have shelves devoted to addiction, trauma, relationships, death and dying, spirituality, etc. and tried not to do too much duplication here). Which means this is a bit of a mish-mash. There’s Ellen Vora’s book, The Anatomy of Anxiety, Andrew Solomon’s Noonday Demon, and a few books about our favorite diagnosis to give each other: Narcissism. I love Craig Malkin’s take on it, and the idea of healthy narcissism (which is theoretically where we should all be on the spectrum). I also included a bunch of books about emotions: There’s Susan David’s Emotional Agility, Lisa Feldman Barrett’s How Emotions Are Made, Brené Brown’s Atlas of the Heart, and more. Tell me what I’m missing!

Please, as always, drop recommendations in the comments, I am always all ears for recommendations. The link below will take you to a shelf I curated on Bookshop with my picks—I earn an affiliate commission there, but it is ALWAYS MY PREFERENCE that you shop at and support your local bookseller, so no pressure to buy via Bookshop. This is the easiest way for me to organize and keep picks updated. Happy reading!