Books like Singermann — picked by fans

Joanna Faber is the daughter of Adele Faber, a pioneer of the internationally acclaimed best-selling How To Talk series that has helped millions of parents worldwide. Joanna joined forces with her childhood friend Julie King to provide support for parents and educators of the 21st century. Each draws on her own experiences – Joanna as a bilingual teacher in West Harlem, Julie as a specialist in helping parents of children on the autism spectrum – to lead workshops and speak to parent groups, teachers, doctors, and librarians worldwide, including online sessions to support parents during Covid lockdowns and afterwards. Together, Joanna and Julie have written two best-selling How To Talk books. 

While volunteering in a psychotic disorder unit at a Montreal psychiatric hospital, I witnessed firsthand the extraordinary lives of people hospitalized for their symptoms. As their stories accumulated, I felt compelled to record them. What emerged was a stark indictment of society’s failure to see the human being behind experiences such as hearing voices, delusions, and hallucinations. Compounding this injustice is the persistent, misguided belief that psychosis and violence are intrinsically linked—they are not. My work became a mission: to reveal the humanity behind the diagnosis and to challenge the stigma, opening minds to the creativity, beauty, and love that exist in every person who has endured the profound exclusion of mental illness.

While volunteering in a psychotic disorder unit at a Montreal psychiatric hospital, I witnessed firsthand the extraordinary lives of people hospitalized for their symptoms. As their stories accumulated, I felt compelled to record them. What emerged was a stark indictment of society’s failure to see the human being behind experiences such as hearing voices, delusions, and hallucinations. Compounding this injustice is the persistent, misguided belief that psychosis and violence are intrinsically linked—they are not. My work became a mission: to reveal the humanity behind the diagnosis and to challenge the stigma, opening minds to the creativity, beauty, and love that exist in every person who has endured the profound exclusion of mental illness.

I’d been writing for forty years before I could write about the biggest story in my life. My 25 non-fiction books about the American West—landscape, Native peoples, conservation—are a joy to research, photograph, and create. But I had unfinished emotional business: my mentally ill brother who left home when I was six, never to return. After everyone in my family was gone, it was finally safe. I began to recreate my brother’s life, reveling in research. I know how to do that. Opening myself emotionally to the heart of my family story took far longer. Empathy is a choice, and I’ve made my choice.

My childhood was marred by change and a search for meaning. Born in the UK to an English mother and Iraqi father, moving to Iraq as a toddler and then back to the UK as a 14-year-old, I was exposed to the dramatic differences in the unwritten rules of how we are meant to behave and experience the world. It was probably inevitable that after training as a doctor, I would eventually end up as a child and adolescent psychiatrist grappling with big questions about life and its struggles. These are the books that opened my mind to re-imagining these dilemmas. I hope they help to open yours, too.

Back in 1977 the experiences and concerns of police families were invisible. Police officers were regarded as super-humans, unaffected by their day-to-day exposure to tragedy, cruelty, and stress. In my counseling job, I heard very different stories from their spouses. Ever since, it has been my mission to support police families and find ways to keep the job from damaging family life. It has taken more than two decades, but I am pleased and proud to say police families are no longer invisible. The books I picked are proof that the family behind the badge matters as much as the person wearing it.

My name is Jess, and I'm a writer, designer, and illustrator based in South Yorkshire, UK. I have always found navigating my feelings and emotions tricky, even from a very young age. Labeled as 'too sensitive,' I would often find that I felt and reacted to things more deeply than others did. In my mid 20s I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety and began going to therapy, this is where I leant a wealth of things about myself and began to find ways to cope and better deal with how I travelled through life. 

I’ve been studying Shamanic energy work for over 25 years, and it’s been more than a practice—it’s a way of living, seeing, and healing. From an early age, I was drawn to the unseen parts of life. I questioned everything, all the time. I always felt that there was more to our existence than what we’re taught. My path has led me through personal transformation and into the sacred work of guiding others on their spiritual journeys. I recommend these books because they’ve moved, challenged, and expanded my understanding in soul-aligned ways. I return to them often, and I trust them to inspire those ready to look deeper into themselves.

After life-threatening postpartum depression in the 1980s, I became a pioneer of maternal mental health in the U.S. I’ve helped moms and moms-to-be finally receive the support they deserve. Between masters’ degrees, Ph.D., teaching credentials, and becoming licensed as a clinical psychologist, I wrote four books and enjoy interviews on radio and TV. Training health professionals and my clients to develop a wellness strategy for motherhood has been my life’s passion. A few years ago I realized that during this movement, dads’ experiences had been disregarded and minimized, and my mission then shifted to parental mental health. Dad’s worries and needs are important too.

According to my mother, my first words were, “what’s that?” and I believe that’s indicative of the level of curiosity with which I try to approach life. That curiosity led me to write books about how we can better love ourselves and each other when depression is gumming up the works. Talking about mental illness is hard, and I aim to make it easier. I’m not a doctor or therapist. I am best described as a “sex writer with a theatre degree” and I like to say my work focuses on sex, mental health, and how none of us are broken.