May is Mental Health Awareness Month and a great time to explore the many writers who write on diverse topics related to mental health and mental illness. The following list of books about mental illness contains fiction, graphic novels, nonfiction, memoirs, biographies, and more, all books that broaden our understanding of mental illness from first hand and second hand experiences. Whether it’s May or the other eleven months, reading books about me
1 72 Hour Hold – Bebe Moore Campbell
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3 All the Bright Places – Jennifer Niven
4 All the Things We Never Knew: Chasing the Chaos of Mental Illness – Sheila Hamilton
5 Americanah – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
6 The Awakening – Kate Chopin
7 Awakening Kali – T. S. Ghosh
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9 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
10 Beloved – Toni Morrison
11 The Bipolar Disorder Survival Guide – David Miklowitz
12 Bleeding Violet – Dia Reeves
13 The Buddha and the Borderline: My Recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder through Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Buddhism, and Online Dating – Kiera Van Gelder
14 By the Time You Read This, I’ll Be Dead – Julie Ann Peters
15 The Color of Hope: People of Color Mental Health Narratives – ed. Vanessa Hazzard
16 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
17 Crazy – Han Nolan y
18 Darkness Visible – William Styron
19 Dragonfish – Vu Tran
20 Every Last Word – Tamara Ireland Stone
21 Everything, Everything – Nicola Yoon
22 The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder – David J. Morris
23 Everything I Never Told You – Celeste Ng
24 Fangirl – Rainbow Rowell
25 Find You in the Dark – A. Meredith Walters
26 Flowers From the Storm – Laura Kinsale
27 Franny and Zooey – J. D. Salinger
28 Furiously Happy – Jenny Lawson
29 Get Me Out of Here: My Recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder – Rachel Reiland
30 Girl, Interrupted – Susanna Kaysen
31 Haldol and Hyacinths: A Bipolar Life – Melody Moezzi
32 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
33 The Hours – Michael Cunningham
34 Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened – Allie Brosh
35 Imagine Me Gone – Adam Haslett
36 Impulse – Ellen Hopkins
37 It’s Kind of a Funny Story – Ned Vizzini
38 The Last Time We Said Goodbye – Cynthia Hand
39 Keep Me Still – Caisey Quinn
40 Let the Tornado Come – Rita Zoey Chin
41 A Little Life – Hanya Yanagihara
42 Look Straight Ahead – Elaine M. Will
43 Looking for Alaska – John Green
44 Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl – Stacy Pershall
45 Made You Up – Francesca Zappia
46 Madness: A Bipolar Life – Marya Hornbacher
47 The Madness of Lord Ian Mackenzie – Jennifer Ashley
48 The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination – Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar
49 The Man Who Couldn’t Stop: OCD and the True Story of a Life Lost in Thought
50 Manic: A Memoir – Terri Cheney
51 Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo and Me – Ellen Forney
52 The Marriage Plot – Jeffrey Eugenides
53 The Memory of Light – Francisco X. Stork
54 Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
55 More Happy Than Not – Adam Silvera
56 The Museum of Intangible Things – Wendy Wunder
57 My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind – Scott Stossel
58 My Heart and Other Black Holes – Jasmine Warga
59 The Nest – Kenneth Oppel
60 The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression – Andrew Solomon
61 Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
62 Not Alone: Reflections on Faith and Depression – Monica A. Coleman
63 A Note of Madness – Tabitha Suzuma
64 Ophelia Speaks: Adolescent Girls Write About Their Search for Self – Sara Shandler
65 Out of Her Mind: Women Writing on Mental Illness – Rebecca Shannonhouse (ed.)
66 Paperweight – Meg Haston
67 Polarity – Max Bemis
68 Prozac Nation – Elizabeth Wurtzel
69 Psychiatric Tales: Eleven Graphic Stories about Mental Illness – Daryl Cunningham
70 The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness – Lori Schiller
71 Reasons To Stay Alive – Matt Haig
72 The Round House by Louise Erdrich
73 The Salt Eaters – Toni Cade Bambara
74 Shadows in the Sun: Healing from Depression and Finding the Light Within – Gayathri Ramprasad
75 She’s Come Undone – Wally Lamb
76 The Silver Linings Playbook– Matthew Quick
77 Skinny – Donna Cooner
78 Sparks Off You – Anita Felicelli
79 Stop Pretending: What Happened When My Big Sister Went Crazy – Sonya Sones
80 Stranger – Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith
81 The Surrendered – Chang-rae Lee
82 Swallow Me Whole – Nate Powell
83 A Tale for the Time Being – Ruth Ozeki
84 Ten Ways Not to Commit Suicide – Darryl “DMC” McDaniels
85 Therapy – Kathryn Perez
86 Thirteen Reasons Why – Jay Asher
87 Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament – Kay Redfield Jamison
88 The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath – Sylvia Plath
89 The Unlikely Hero of Room 13B – Teresa Toten
90 An Unquiet Mind – Kay Redfield Jamison
91 The Virgin Suicides – Jeffrey Eugenides
92 Your Voice is All I Hear – Leah Scheier
93 Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia – Marya Hornbacher
94 When Reason Breaks – Cindy L. Rodriguez
95 When We Collided – Emery Lord
96 White Oleander – Janet Fitch
97 Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
98 Willow – Julia Hoban
99 Willow Weep for Me: A Black Woman’s Journey through Depression – Meri Nana-Ama Danquah
100 Wintergirls – Laurie Halse Anderson
101 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
102 The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman