Life Inside My Mind: 31 Authors Share Their Personal Struggles ed. by Jessica Burkhart (review)

In this collection of personal essays, thirty-one authors of children's and young adult literature (including well-known names such as Hannah Moskowitz, Francisco X. Stork, and Francesca Lia Block) reveal their struggles with anxiety, depression, compulsions to self-harm, suicidal ideations, and other mental conditions and disorders. A few discuss their experiences with close others who are suffering, but most describe in detail what their own good and bad days are like. Some use evocative metaphors and images, while others are quite literal, and nearly all describe the therapies and strategies that they have found effective while highlighting that there are no easy, permanent, or one-size-fits-all solutions. Most of the essays are explicitly directive in encouraging readers to seek help, and comforting in the authors' insistence that seemingly abnormal mental conditions are in fact more prevalent than one might realize and certainly survivable given proper treatment. The individuality of the approaches does tend to constitute such problems as being entirely intrapsychic, since there's no talk of wider social conditions that require activist rather than merely therapeutic solutions. For teens who are suffering, though, these authors prove that, with the help of friends, professionals, and/or the right combination of meds, people with mental health issues can flourish, attain success, and help others by sharing their stories, whether personal or creative. KC