5d • Community Updates
✨ Reading Circle Book Ideas ✨
I’m so excited for our Reading Circle today! I refreshed our list of potential books we’ll be choosing from over the coming months. I kept some favorites from our previous Reading Circle, added a bunch of new ones, and included several wonderful suggestions from members of our community. 💙
Today’s meeting will be a little different—we’ll spend our time reading brief summaries of these books together so we can narrow down which one we’d like to read next as a group.
📖 Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen – A literary memoir exploring psychiatric hospitalization, identity, and recovery through a feminist lens.
📖 Mad in America – A landmark examination of the history of psychiatric treatment and long-term medication outcomes.
📖 Living with Voices – Introduces the Hearing Voices approach, encouraging people to understand and relate to their voices rather than simply suppress them.
📖 Agnes’s Jacket – Explores stories of madness and recovery from psychiatric survivors around the world, highlighting diverse paths to healing outside conventional systems.
📖 The Book of Woe – An engaging behind-the-scenes look at how psychiatric diagnoses are created and the debates that shape the DSM.
📖 Outside Mental Health – Offers practical ideas and survivor perspectives for navigating emotional distress beyond the traditional mental health system.
📖 Beyond Survival – Explores disability justice, transformative justice, and community-based alternatives to policing, punishment, and institutional responses to crisis.
📖 Care Work – A collection of essays on disability justice, mutual aid, interdependence, and building communities where everyone belongs.
📖 Models of Madness – Presents evidence-based psychological, social, and trauma-informed alternatives to the biomedical model of mental illness.
📖 Emergent Strategy – Invites readers to imagine social change through relationships, adaptation, and collective care, with lessons that translate beautifully to peer support communities.
📖 Sexy But Psycho – A powerful feminist critique of how women are pathologized, disbelieved, and labeled “mentally ill” in ways that reinforce sexism, victim-blaming, and social control.
📖 How to Be an Imperfectionist – A practical guide to letting go of perfectionism, embracing “good enough,” and building a more flexible, self-compassionate way of living.
📖 Trauma Bonding – Explores how trauma bonds form in abusive and controlling relationships, offering insight into why they’re so difficult to leave and how healing and reconnection become possible.
I hope to see you there! I’m looking forward to hearing which books resonate most with everyone so we can choose our next read together. 📚💙
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✨ Reading Circle Book Ideas ✨
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