Books and Me

by Katie Hurley (2019) With news that 9/10 teens are worried about their mental health, and that a third state that they feel helpless, sad and or fearful frequently and this problem far outstripping any help that is offered by others, these sorts of work books would seem to have a big and important function. This one does the job efficiently enough. There isn't anything you won't already have read before in other places, but it puts all the strategies in one neat place succinctly and clearly, and even if you don't have any mood disorder, often seems to offer very sensible strategies for life. Whether a teen would actually engage with it in the first place, let alone actually benefit from it, is another matter altogether. Rating 6/10

by Jennie Marie Battistin (2019) One of the biggest problems with selling mindfulness to teens, in my experience, is that it just sounds hokey.  Why should they bother with it? It doesn't sound as if it would work and there are better things to be doing with one's time.  Plus, don't try to whitewash problems.  If there is an issue, solve it directly.  Don't try to make the poor victim just accept that this is how things are whilst deluding themselves that everything is hunky dory.   And the awful thing is, they may have a point.  I mean, there are quite a few recent studies out there which suggest that mindfulness is not all it's been cracked up to be.  And yes, perhaps mindfulness is occasionally used coercively as a cover for appallingly stressful situations. I remember an example of this in the NHS a while back: nurses who were working on desperately understaffed wards being taught mindfulness in nursing school in order to manage their a...

by Heather T. Forbes (2010)  Phew, therapy that makes sense!  It sees the problems for what it really are and offers utterly wonderful, compassionate solutions.  It's a peculiar experience - when you finish this book, it all seems so obvious but that's probably because the explanations of the underlying causes of trauma-related behaviour are so right and real that it gives you the impression that it must have been staring you in the face all along. However, clearly this has been a difficult nut to crack and a good chunk of this book describes other nominally therapeutic strategies that are actually no help at all and indeed are often sources of even more trauma for the family. If your young person has been traumatised by something, including past therapy, read this utterly sensible, kind book. Rating: 9/10

By Lisa Damour (2017) It's hard to give an one size fits all rating to a book which is mostly superb but which also contains a few suggestions that are neither easy to implement or to accept, so it is necessary to break it down a bit in this review.  On the very large plus side, the analysis of the problem of raising girls in the First World is spot on, although in this regard, there is probably more to be said about the recent surge in anxiety in young women and indeed Lisa has just written a book on this exact subject  which is due for release in the near future.  On the downside, scattered amongst the often extremely sensible suggestions, there are a few strategies that simply won't work for empowered teens who have grown up with huge spades of confidence in their young years but who suddenly face the brick wall of puberty in the modern, nominally comfortable world we mostly live in nowadays. You do have to wonder if a good old dose of the Blitz wou...