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Minority Mental Health Month (July)

Created on June 25, 2020, 11:32 am

Last Updated July 14, 2025, 1:38 pm

Non-fiction, memoirs, and fiction that highlight experiences of mental illness and healing in BIPOC communities.

1) Black girls breathing: heal from trauma, combat chronic stress, and find your freedom

Author

Description

"From breathwork practitioner and the founder of black girls breathing®, a practical path for Black women to heal trauma, combat chronic stress, and find freedom in their own bodies and minds. It's no secret that Black women have been oppressed for centuries and, as a Black woman herself, Jasmine Marie knows the impact that intergenerational trauma and systemic racism have had-and continue to have-on her community. Those experiences are why she founded...

2) Permission to come home: reclaiming mental health as Asian Americans

Author

Description

"The first of its kind, Permission to Come Home is a crucial resource for the rapidly growing community of Asian Americans, immigrants, and other minorities and marginalized people to practice mental and emotional self-care. This book helps readers work on their mental health while understanding and honoring the richness of their heritage and embodying a new, complete, and whole identity. Throughout, Dr. Jenny Wang weaves together personal stories...

3) Self-care for black men: 100 ways to heal and liberate

Author

Caraballo, Jor-El

Description

"Black men desperately need care and restoration. But what does that restoration look like when you're a Black man in today's world? How do you take care of your mental health when men who look like you die at the hands of police? How do you find peace and refuge when you're not sure how to keep up with your partner? Or navigate a challenging workplace? While scrolling through social media feeds, you may feel like you don't have access to wellness...

4) Reclaiming the black body: nourishing the home within

Author

McCullough, Alishia

Description

"Food has always been a political tool for the oppressor--and the Black body has always been one of its many battlegrounds. Licensed mental health therapist, somatic healer, and eating disorder specialist Alishia McCullough understands that for far too many Black women, racial trauma's seismic impact has disrupted their most essential relationship: the one they have with their bodies--and by extension, with their food. African Americans are disproportionately...

5) 72 hour hold: a novel

Author

Campbell, Bebe Moore, 1950-2006

Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • "A tightly woven, well-written story about mothers and daughters, highs and lows, ex-husbands and boyfriends.... Universally touching." —San Francisco Chronicle
Trina is eighteen and suffers from bi-polar disorder, making her paranoid, wild, and violent. Frightened by her own child, Keri searches for help, quickly learning that the mental health community can only offer

...

6) Checking in: how getting real about depression saved my life-and can save yours

Author

Williams, Michelle (Tenitra Michelle)

Description

"Acclaimed musical artist Michelle Williams shares the intimate, never-before-told story of how, even in the midst of enormous fame and success, she battled depression, leading her to find her true calling as an advocate for mental health--especially her own"-- Provided by publisher.

7) My grandmother's hands: racialized trauma and the pathway to mending our hearts and bodies

Author

Menakem, Resmaa

Description

"The body is where our instincts reside and where we fight, flee, or freeze, and it endures the trauma inflicted by the ills that plague society. In this groundbreaking work, therapist Resmaa Menakem examines the damage caused by racism in America from the perspective of body-centered psychology. He argues this destruction will continue until Americans learn to heal the generational anguish of white supremacy, which is deeply embedded in all our bodies....

8) Nobody knows the trouble I've seen: the emotional lives of black women

Author

Burnett-Zeigler, Inger

Description

A Northwestern University clinical psychologist challenges common cultural misconceptions to reveal the real-world systemic abuse, health traumas, and abandonment that disempower today's Black women and force them to hide behind masks of strength.

9) Under the skin: the hidden toll of racism on American lives and the health of a nation

Author

Villarosa, Linda

Description

"The first book to tell the full story of race and health in America today, showing the toll racism takes on individuals and the health of our nation, by a groundbreaking journalist at the New York Times Magazine"-- Provided by publisher.

10) The unapologetic guide to Black mental health: navigate an unequal system, learn tools for emotional wellness, and get the help you deserve

Author

Description

"It's time to reclaim your mental health. We can't deny it any longer: there is a Black mental health crisis in our world today. In addition, the effects of under-education, poverty, and systemic racism have greatly impacted African Americans' access to effective mental health treatment. It's time to take Black mental health seriously. It's time to heal our psychological distress, find community, and combat marginalization in order to thrive. So,...

11) Good morning, monster: a therapist shares five heroic stories of emotional recovery

Author

Gildiner, Catherine, 1948-

Description

In this fascinating narrative, therapist Catherine Gildiner's presents five of what she calls her most heroic and memorable patients. Among them: a successful, first generation Chinese immigrant musician suffering sexual dysfunction; a young woman whose father abandoned her at age nine with her younger siblings in an isolated cottage in the depth of winter; and a glamorous workaholic whose narcissistic, negligent mother greeted her each morning of...

12) Dear friend, from my life I write to you in your life

Author

Li, Yiyun, 1972-

Description

"Yiyun Li's searing personal story of hospitalizations for depression and thoughts of suicide is interlaced with reflections on the solace and affirmations of life and personhood that Li found in reading the journals, diaries, and fiction of other writers: William Trevor, Katherine Mansfield, and more"-- Provided by publisher.

13) My body is a book of rules

Author

Washuta, Elissa

14) The salt eaters

Author

Bambara, Toni Cade

Description

"Story of a community of black people searching for the healing properties of salt, who witness an event that will change their lives forever. Some of them are centered, some are off-balance; some are frightened, and some are daring."--Page 4 of cover.

15) Invisible man, got the whole world watching: a young black man's education

Author

Smith, Mychal Denzel, 1986-

Description

"... Mychal Denzel Smith chronicles his own personal and political education during these tumultuous years, describing his efforts to come into his own in a world that denied his humanity. Smith unapologetically upends reigning assumptions about black masculinity, rewriting the script for black manhood so that depression and anxiety aren't considered taboo, and feminism and LGBTQ rights become part of the fight. The questions Smith asks in this book...

16) Willow weep for me: a black woman's journey through depression

Author

Danquah, Meri Nana-Ama

17) Bipolar Faith: A Black Woman's Journey with Depression and Faith

Author

Coleman, Monica A

Description

Monica A. Coleman's great-grandfather asked his two young sons to lift him up and pull out the chair when he hanged himself, and that noose stayed in the family shed for years. The rope was the violent instrument, but it was mental anguish that killed him. Now, in gripping fashion, Coleman examines the ways that the legacies of slavery, war, sharecropping, poverty, and alcoholism mask a family history of mental illness. Those same forces accompanied

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18) I'm telling the truth, but i'm lying: essays

Author

Description

2020 Audie Finalist – Short Stories/Collections

In I'm Telling the Truth, but I'm Lying Bassey Ikpi explores her life—as a Nigerian-American immigrant, a black woman, a slam poet, a mother, a daughter, an artist—through the lens of her mental health and diagnosis of bipolar II and anxiety. Her remarkable memoir in essays implodes our preconceptions of the mind and normalcy as Bassey

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19) The collected schizophrenias: essays

Author

Wang, Esmé Weijun

Description

"Schizophrenia is not a single unifying diagnosis, and Esmé Weijun Wang writes not just to her fellow members of the 'collected schizophrenias' but to those who wish to understand it as well. Opening with the journey toward her diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder, Wang discusses the medical community's own disagreement about labels and procedures for diagnosing those with mental illness, and then follows an arc that examines the manifestations...

20) The body papers: a memoir

Author

Description

Born in the Philippines, young Grace Talusan moves with her family to a New England suburb in the 1970s. At school, she confronts racism as one of the few kids with a brown face. At home, the confusion is worse: her grandfather's nightly visits to her room leave her hurt and terrified, and she learns to build a protective wall of silence that maps onto the larger silence practiced by her Catholic Filipino family. Talusan learns as a teenager that...