Alex

Mental Health Awareness Week: book round up

This week is Mental Health Awareness Week, so I’m posting some of the stuff that’s landed in my inbox in relation to it. Today I’ve got a couple of books that look interesting, one for children and one for adults. The first book, Being Me (and Loving It), looks particularly relevant to boys as their self esteem is crucial at a young age, where they often lag behind girls academically. The second book, What you’ve got is what you want – Even if it hurts, looks like it could be a challenging read but I suppose in essence you need to be challenged to change.

Being Me (and Loving It)

COVER Being Me and Loving ItThis innovative book, created by Naomi Richards (The Kids Coach) and Julia Hague, takes 29 real-life case studies to demonstrate why self-esteem and body confidence in children aged 5-11 is important … and how to build confidence. Each example is presented as part of a ready-to-use lesson plan that builds into a comprehensive, usable guide for teachers, but it is also proving incredibly popular with parents who want to support their child.

This book covers a huge range of issues including lack of body confidence, feeling pressured by peers, bullying, and worries about puberty. To create the lesson-plan structure, each story is preceded by guidance on how to introduce the topic and the learning outcomes and is followed by a range of activities to reinforce the messages being taught. Publishing by JKP, the book (released April 2016) is a multifaceted resource that could be used with groups of children in PSHE lessons or in one-to-one settings in therapy or at home.

What you’ve got is what you want – Even if it hurts
what youPsychoanalyst Adam E Jukes’ previous books have tackled the roots of toxic masculinity but his new title provides a revolutionary viewpoint for all relationships, particularly broken ones. “You are responsible for everything that is wrong with your relationship including any behaviour of your partner which you use to justify, excuse, or in any other way account for your own behaviour towards him/her, or the world in general.”
Adam Juke’s ‘Mad Hypothesis’ (so called because, at first glance, it appears to be just that – mad) is the epicentre of his new book, which is not filled with comforting psycho-babble and it certainly shouldn’t be listed in the ‘self-help’ section, instead it places its readers’ happiness firmly within their own realm of responsibility. ‘ What you’ve got is what you want’ is designed to allow its readers to re-evaluate the relationships they’re in, their behaviour and what they are doing to contribute to their own problems.
Adam writes from an expert opinion that is informed by more than four decades of therapeutic experience but is not inaccessible to a more spontaneous reader. After all, most of us can relate to issues in relationships over the years; from friendships to marriages, sibling rivalry to family rifts. Adam unpacks the psychological jargon he uses to make sure any reader can understand and learn from the ideas that he presents in the book.
To fully explain his ‘Mad Hypothesis’ Adam looks at subjects including anxiety, sulking, masochism, and attachment issues. Built upon Adam’s professional experiences, the book incorporates a number of illuminating case studies that demonstrate how his theories can impact upon people’s lives. If you are troubled by your life and want to make changes, but don’t know where to begin, this book is for you. This is a book about relationships and how the way you act, your behaviours, are driven by thoughts, feelings, and impulses of which you may not have any conscious awareness…yet