Book Reviews

These are the books that have informed my thinking and coaching. It is a selected list of what I consider the best books in their class, and I recommend every one. Each carries my five-star rating. Books I do not rate at five stars are not listed.

A Mind of Your Own

Kelly Brogan, MD, with Kristin Loberg

A psychiatrist's case against treating depression as a fixed chemical deficit and against antidepressants as the default response to it, paired with a 30-day protocol addressing diet, gut health, thyroid function, and inflammation instead.

Brain Energy

Christopher M. Palmer, MD

A Harvard psychiatrist's case that mental disorders share a common root in how brain cells produce and use energy — mitochondrial function — and that genetics, inflammation, hormones, sleep, diet, and exercise all act on mental health through that one shared mechanism. Diet, including ketogenic approaches, is part of the treatment picture Palmer proposes follows from it.

Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind

Georgia Ede, MD

A Harvard-trained psychiatrist's case that insulin resistance — a largely silent metabolic problem that doesn't require a diabetes diagnosis to do damage — starves brain cells of the energy they need, paired with a personalised, self-testable plan, running from moderate-carbohydrate to fully ketogenic, for correcting it.

Crossing Zero

Anders Sørensen, PhD

A practical, science-grounded guide to tapering off psychiatric drugs — antidepressants, antipsychotics, benzodiazepines, mood stabilisers, and stimulants — written by a Danish clinical psychologist who has run a dedicated tapering practice for a decade. The book covers the taper itself, then what comes after: building a life once the drug stops doing the work it was doing.

Internal Family Systems Therapy

Richard C. Schwartz and Martha Sweezy

The clinical textbook behind Internal Family Systems therapy: a model that treats the mind as made up of distinct “parts” — wounded parts, protective parts, reactive parts — organised around a core Self that is never damaged, only buried, and a method for working with each part directly rather than trying to think your way past them.

Man's Search for Meaning

Viktor E. Frankl

A psychiatrist's account of surviving Nazi concentration camps. In the camps he observed those who survived and what differentiated them from those who didn't. He concluded that those who found meaning survived, and those who had lost a sense of meaning did not. His view is that the need for meaning in life is innate. He built from his experience that meaning, not pleasure or comfort, is what a person needs to survive suffering that cannot be removed. A person can bear almost any how if a why remains. That meaning is the last freedom that cannot be taken.

May Cause Side Effects

Brooke Siem

A memoir of fifteen years on antidepressants, roughly ten thousand pills, prescribed at fifteen after her father's sudden death — and the year of withdrawal that followed once she finally set out to find who she was without them.

Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal

Peter R. Breggin, MD

A clinical guide to coming off psychiatric medication, built on one principle: the person withdrawing is in charge of the process. If you have been told you will need the medication for life, or that returning symptoms mean your illness is back, it sets out the reasoning to test that and a method for acting on it.

The Drama of the Gifted Child

Alice Miller

Some children are praised for being unusually sensitive or capable. Miller argues they often become that way by learning to sense and meet their parents' needs, not their own. A false self forms to secure love. The real feelings underneath go into hiding.

The Maudsley Deprescribing Guidelines: Antidepressants, Benzodiazepines, Gabapentinoids and Z-Drugs

Mark Horowitz and David Taylor

A 592-page clinical reference for safely reducing or stopping antidepressants, benzodiazepines, gabapentinoids and z-drugs, written by a psychiatrist-in-training and a professor of psychopharmacology. It sets out, for the first time in one place, a proper evidence base for hyperbolic tapering — reducing by a shrinking proportion of the current dose rather than a fixed amount.

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman

A masterful deconstruction of the dual-system mind Kahneman calls System 1 and System 2. It maps the friction between our fast, intuitive autopilot and our slow, deliberate logic, exposing the hidden cognitive blind spots and systematic biases that silently sabotage executive judgment and human choice.

Time to Think

Nancy Kline

A profound examination of how the quality of our attention determines the quality of other people's thinking. It maps out the "Thinking Environment," a framework designed to help people think for themselves. This book radically changed how I listen. If you carry a demanding job and have nobody to think out loud with, this book explains what is missing, and what to do about it.

Unshrunk

Laura Delano

A memoir, told in the first person, of fourteen years inside the psychiatric system — a bipolar diagnosis in her early teens, a mood stabiliser and antidepressant soon after, and the long road back to a self underneath all of it. Delano doesn't offer a method or an argument. She tells her own story and lets it stand.