The most recommended major depressive disorder books

Though this is technically an academic book, it is extremely readable and the best account of the manipulative marketing, hidden court cases, and corruption that occurred during the development of Prozac and Zoloft.

It’s one of those books where, if my mother or I had read it before I was medicated at 15, I’m quite sure we would not have made the same choices. 

This book is a beautiful, inspiring weaving tale of a psychiatrist who has recurrent depression and has worked with people with depression. She doesn’t disguise how hard depression is, she doesn’t patronise, she explains depression from her personal point of view, explores what happened in her childhood, and explains a clinician’s point of view of depression. 

It’s embedded with bucket loads of empathy, compassion, and hope. You hear about the patients she’s helped and you come out feeling humbled and grateful for her telling her story. Very useful for professionals working in psychiatry and mental health but equally useful for those of us with this terrible illness.

More is not always better. More choices, more options—although they are what we crave to have and even see them as part of our definition of "freedom" sometimes—can be devastating and paralyzing. As I was writing my own book, which deals a lot with choices and the way we make them, Barry Schwartz's clear and smart book was a reminder about how narrowing down our options can be a good thing.

As a long-suffering fan of the Seattle Mariners, who have avoided success longer than any other North American sports team this century, how could I not love a novel whose central premise is what would happen if an elite professional sports team, the defending National League champs, fielded an entire line-up of players overwhelmed by clinical depression? This is the funniest sad book I’ve ever read. Well, maybe the second after Catch 22. All the characters play baseball, but the book is less about sport than it is about how humans survive a hostile world.

We've reached the only actual “how to do mental illness” book on this list and it’s an all time favorite of mine.

Skoczen is not a doctor or a therapist and isn’t afraid to drop a couple of f-bombs when talking about mental health… so, yeah, he’s a lot like me, which may be part of why I love this book so much.

Engaging, reassuring, and full of concrete strategies for navigating depression both as someone with it and as someone who loves someone with it, I have recommended this book for years. 

I read Darkness Visible in the midst of my worst depressive episode around 2008. I remember relating completely to his vivid descriptions of highly abstract psychological sensations, impending doom, for example, in which one feels askew to her or his surroundings, like death is imminent but you don’t know from where or how. Styron describes depression as being not unlike physical pain, and that moment in which you simply and utterly succumb to a kind of unprecedented existential suffering, if you will. It is a moment of agony, tender, fierce and absolute. Without a hint of self-indulgence, his rendering of depression is immaculate, a reckoning of the self, a crucible.

Being a Christian often means “faking it” on Sunday mornings. We’re all fine then. So often we internalize that and show a smile to the world when all we feel is shattered inside. This books gives voice to the darkness that so many Christians feel but don’t know how to express. Like the other books on my list, though, it also points to real hope. It also includes a list of resources in the back of the book. 

This story’s protagonist, Jessi, remains one of my favorite YA protagonists; she’s the sort of girl I would’ve loved being friends with as a teenager. And the Cohen boys… it’s no wonder Jessi is so enamored with them both! A poignant narrative centering around unimaginable tragedy, Some Other Now combines two of my favorite romance tropes: the boy next door and the love triangle. It’s a story about best friends, broken families, and love in all its fiercest forms, written with thoughtfulness and lyricism.

This is another novel written expressly for teenagers, and all the better for it.

Inflected by the author’s own autobiographical experiences—like Craig, the novel’s narrator, Vizzini spent a week in a psychiatric hospital as a teenager—It’s Kind of a Funny Story was the first work of fiction I’d read that articulated the adolescent experience through the language of mental health. It was here that I learned “depression” isn’t an abstracted emotion but the very real neurochemical imbalance that impels Craig to call the suicide hotline after abandoning his SSRIs.

There’s an uncanny familiarity to the circumstances of Craig’s breakdown—namely in how he struggles to remain above water at a famously rigorous college preparatory high school—and a fundamental earnestness to his story’s confessions that gilds even its grimmest moments with a fifteen-year-old's sense of impressionable wonder.

I continue to search for wonderful Christmas fiction that warms the heart. This past year I read several titles of Richard Paul Evans, who some refer to as “the king of Christmas stories.” His small book stories offer protagonists with life challenges and are sometimes partly autobiographical. 

Because I am so fascinated with how memory works, I was glued to his story, The Noel Diary. 

The male protagonist, a writer, struggles with the deeply unresolved relationships with his parents and with a floating, recurrent memory of a woman he does not know. While cleaning out his deceased mother’s house, he discovers a diary. This triggers an unexpected journey in which he pairs up with a young woman searching for her birth parents.