In comedian Youngmi Mayer's new memoir, laughter is a lifeline

Mental health disorders affect millions of people and often lead to the tragic loss of life through suicide. The pain and suffering that accompany mental illness are difficult for those unafflicted to understand. Kay Redfield Jamison, a clinical psychologist living with manic-depressive disorder, has attempted to bring awareness to those experiences in her memoir. By divulging the violent, frenzied, and dangerous aspects of her disease, Jamison hopes to create more understanding about mental illness and more empathy for those who struggle to exist in the normal world.

You’ve seen him play a cigarette-smoking, intimacy-fearing, humor-as-a-cudgel-wielding twenty-something from a broken home trying to find love and build a meaningful career. But Matthew Perry’s role as Chandler on the iconic show Friends is a lot closer to reality than you might have imagined. In Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, Perry shares his story of battling loneliness, health scares, and the big terrible thing: addiction. His hope is that it will help others who are also struggling with substance abuse know they are not alone in their challenges, and that, if he could get sober, they can, too.

This guide explores the evolution of three major themes throughout Perry’s life: his addiction, struggles in establishing relationships, and his search for fame. We also contextualize the events and struggles of his life within psychological theories about childhood trauma, attachment theory, and the nature of addiction and recovery.

In Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, psychologist Lindsey Gibson dispels the myth that “parents know best,” revealing the damage that emotionally neglectful parents can do to their children. Gibson explores key features of emotionally underdeveloped parents and how their behavior impacts their children. She also provides strategies to help adults who suffered childhood emotional neglect turn their relationship with their parent from toxic to tolerable, and develop healthier emotional connections with others.

Gibson is an adult psychotherapy and personal growth counseling specialist. She wrote Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents to help survivors of emotional neglect free themselves from dysfunctional relationships with their parents and find emotional fulfillment.

In this guide we’ll look at traits of emotionally underdeveloped parents, coping mechanisms children employ to survive emotional neglect, challenges that those children face in adulthood, and strategies they can use to heal and move forward. We’ll also provide additional viewpoints on living through and moving beyond childhood emotional neglect.

In The Sun and Her Flowers, poet and visual artist Rupi Kaur explores her inner emotional self, her relationships, her experiences with trauma and insecurity, and its effect on her relationships. Through her style of minimalist drawings and poems, she connects things in her personal life to larger social issues: Kaur’s relationship with her mother connects to the struggles of immigrants, refugees, and women of color living in misogynistic societies. A new healthy romantic partnership connects to the joy and difficulty of healing and learning self-love.

In our guide, we’ll explore the main themes of Kaur’s poetry and how they express both her own biography and broader social themes. Through our commentary, we’ll show how others have experienced similar traumas to Kaur, the deeper sociocultural roots of such traumas, and theories on how society might address them.

Michelle Obama's memoir Becoming delivers candid reflections on the life of the first African-American first lady. Offering a window into her personal evolution, Michelle details how ambition, hard work, and embracing her authentic story helped her journey from her family’s Chicago working-class neighborhood to a 47th-floor law office, then to the White House and beyond.

Becoming provides insights into Michelle’s self-determination: She pushed herself to excel in Ivy League classrooms and achieve a prestigious career by age 26, then mustered the courage to swerve off that path in search of greater fulfillment. It details her relationship with Barack—a love story of two opposites—and their challenging quest to navigate family and political life. Through it all, we witness a woman who perpetually strives to become a better version of herself.

Michelle Obama's memoir Becoming delivers candid reflections on the life of the first African-American first lady. Offering a window into her personal evolution, Michelle details how ambition, hard work, and embracing her authentic story helped her journey from her family’s Chicago working-class neighborhood to a 47th-floor law office, then to the White House and beyond.

Becoming provides insights into Michelle’s self-determination: She pushed herself to excel in Ivy League classrooms and achieve a prestigious career by age 26, then mustered the courage to swerve off that path in search of greater fulfillment. It details her relationship with Barack—a love story of two opposites—and their challenging quest to navigate family and political life. Through it all, we witness a woman who perpetually strives to become a better version of herself.

Michelle Obama's memoir Becoming delivers candid reflections on the life of the first African-American first lady. Offering a window into her personal evolution, Michelle details how ambition, hard work, and embracing her authentic story helped her journey from her family’s Chicago working-class neighborhood to a 47th-floor law office, then to the White House and beyond.

Becoming provides insights into Michelle’s self-determination: She pushed herself to excel in Ivy League classrooms and achieve a prestigious career by age 26, then mustered the courage to swerve off that path in search of greater fulfillment. It details her relationship with Barack—a love story of two opposites—and their challenging quest to navigate family and political life. Through it all, we witness a woman who perpetually strives to become a better version of herself.