You Are Not Alone The NAMI Guide to Navigating Mental Health – With Advice from Experts and Wisdom from Real Individuals and Their Families by Ken Duckworth, MD

424 Pages
Publisher: Zando Projects
Release Date: September 20, 2022

Nonfiction (Adult), Health, Body, Mind, Spirit, Self-Help, Mental Health, Healing

The book is divided into the following parts and chapters.

Part I: Mental Health and Mental health Conditions
Chapter 1: Do I Need Help?
Chapter 2: The Paradox of Diagnosis
Chapter 3: How Do I Find Help? Minding the Many aps
Chapter 4: Parthways to Recovery: First Steps
Chapter 5: Added Complexity: Co-Occurring Substance Use Conditions
Chapter 6: The Impact of Trauma
Chapter 7: Helping Your Child, Teen, or Young Adult

Part II: The Recovery Journey: Evidence from Lived Experiences
Chapter 8: Themes of Recovery: Lessons from First-Person Experience
Chapter 9: The Power of Peers and Community
Chapter 10: Culture and Identity: Barriers and Opportunities
Chapter 11: Becoming an Advocate

Part III: Family Matters
Chapter 12: Family Connection and Communication
Chapter 13: Navigating the Legal System
Chapter 14: The hardest Family Questions
Chapter 15: Making Meaning of Loss by Suicide
Chapter 16: Family Advocacy

Part IV: Best Practices
Chapter 17: Experts Answer the Most Frequently Asked Questions
Chapter 18: State-of-the-Art Care and Research for Specific Conditions

I have been affected with mental health issues my entire life. Both of my parents had issues and later in life, I too began dealing with depression and anxiety. There is a sentiment in the book about how people will bring food, flowers, and cards when someone is physically sick but nothing when there is a mental illness. This spoke volumes to me because of its truth. The author explains in detail the many types and cases he has worked with during his career. After reading this book, I definitely felt that I am not alone. If you are dealing with mental health issues or know someone who is, this is definitely a book you should read.

Never has a book like this one been more relevant. Comforting, inspiring and easy to lose yourself in. What more could you ask for?

This book would be good for someone who is just beginning to learn about mental health, or for those who do not suffer from mental illness and want to know more. It’s probably too remedial for anyone who has an ounce of prior knowledge and isn’t too helpful for those who are already diagnosed with a mental illness

I wish this book from the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMHI) existed when I was trying to cope with various family members’ mental health crises. Psychiatrist Dr. Ken Duckworth is the chief medical officer of NAMHI, and he uses his extensive personal and professional experience with mental illness to provide a practical guide for those who are experiencing symptoms of mental illness in themselves or a loved one.

Part I provides an overview of what we do and don’t know about mental illness and how diagnosis and treatment continues to evolve. Part II includes personal stories of the recovery journey from diverse people with personal experience of mental illness. Part III focuses on the stories of those who love someone with mental illness. This section offers some excellent lessons on how to communicate with someone who might not recognize that they need help. Part IV provides answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs) provided by various experts in the field. I found some of those answers particularly helpful. The back matter includes a list of resource organized by chapter and an index.

Although it doesn’t provide as much depth on any particular condition or treatment as other books I have read, I think this is a very good place to start if you suspect that you or a loved one is having issues with mental health. It seems like it would be particularly helpful for a parent trying to care for a child with mental illness. The one thing I wish had been addressed in more detail is dealing with mental illness in a parent or an elderly relative.

I was provided an unproofed ARC through NetGalley that I volunteered to review.

You are Not Alone
by Ken Duckworth, MD
Pub Date: September 20, 2022
Zando
Thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for the ARC of this book. I have already preordered this book and I believe it will be a great resource in our library. I have a counseling background and I was so glad to see there is a reference book for us to have available. It is a tall order to produce a book that hopes to be a "comprehensive guide" for individuals and families dealing with mental health issues. The writing is very clear and intended for the lay reader. The Best Practices section features a Q & A section with answers from noted experts. (Chapter 17 was one of the chapters provided for preview). I very much look forward to reading this book in its entirety and having it as a resource for my patrons.
I highly recommend.
5 stars

You Are Not Alone is a solid addition to any mental health collection. The information presented about various mental illnesses is valuable and informative. While the National Alliance for Mental Illness was originally focused on support for family members of those with mental health challenges it has grown to include robust peer voices and support. You are Not Alone offers information for both peers and family members, frequently from their own voices and experiences. I found the book to be both up-to-date and extremely useful. It is easy to get through for the average reader, avoiding highly technical language and explaining the terms they do use. I highly recommend this book if you are looking for information, support, or simply the knowledge that you are not alone in your struggles.

What a great book. It’s chock full of important information for anyone (at any age) dealing with mental health. The author covers the deficiencies in our current medical coverage with places to contact, even by text. Also covers the many ways to ask for help so that you feel like “you are not alone”. I was pleasantly surprised by the gentle, comforting way the author approached each topic. Next as a society we need to confront all negativity about mental health and not as an oddity.
I received an advanced reader copy for free from NetGalley and am voluntarily leaving my review.

You Are Not Alone: The NAMI Guide to Navigating Mental Health by Ken Duckworth, NAMI’s medical director, is the first book released by the National Alliance on Mental Illness. The book includes excerpts from interviews with 130 people who either self-identify as having a mental illness or have a loved one who does, and the author writes, “Mental illness and recovery are human experiences, so I consider experience-based evidence an authoritative source for this book.”

The book opens with the author talking about his history with NAMI and his family’s experience with his father’s bipolar illness. Throughout the book, he comes across as talking with readers on the same level rather than being an expert talking at readers.

The book is divided into four parts. The first part looks at mental health conditions and mental health care, the second part focuses on people’s experiences with their recovery journeys, the third part focuses on family members, and the final part is devoted to traditional experts answering commonly asked questions.

The author acknowledges the flaws with the DSM diagnostic system, and he’s also realistic about the problems with the mental health care system, or lack thereof: “The mental health ‘system’ throughout the United States is chaotic and full of gaps. It has long been broken and fragmented, and if you try to wait for the system to be less confusing and frustrating, you will be waiting a very long time.” The book talks about medical model and recovery model strategies (focusing on symptoms and living a good life, respectively), and the author encourages a both/and rather than an either/or approach.

Topics covered in the book included peer support, cultural issues, becoming an advocate, and legal issues around things like involuntary treatment, privacy, and police and criminal justice system involvement. The final section included an FAQ chapter with various experts answering questions, as well as a chapter with clinicians and researchers addressing questions about care for depression, OCD, borderline personality disorder, trauma, co-occurring disorders, bipolar disorder, and psychosis. It felt like a lot of disparate things to cram into two chapters.

There was a chapter on making meaning of suicide loss, and there were a couple of comments I found quite interesting. An interviewee who had lost a brother to suicide said “The last engagement he had was with another person who was talking to a classmate about how to divide homework problems, and I found him twenty minutes later. If you’re struggling with suicidal ideation, you’re not talking about homework problems.” The author, whose brother died by suicide, wrote “My brother ordered a computer monitor the day he died, and it arrived the day of his funeral. People who are contemplating suicide don’t do that.” Except they do; if the action hasn’t happened yet, there is some degree of ambivalence, and tasks of living continue in that space of ambivalence.

While the goal was to be comprehensive, I found the book kind of unfocused, and I felt like that detracted from the overall usefulness. I’m all for sharing people’s stories, but the way excerpts from the interviews were pulled together (often a paragraph or two at a time) created a bit of a hodgepodge that made it hard to feel connected to the individuals. While I can see the potential value of interviewing 130 people and interspersing bits of their comments throughout the book, I think it does make it harder for readers to feel like they’re really getting a sense of who these people are.

As you might expect from a NAMI book, there is a NAMI promotional element. Although it wasn’t unexpected, I did think it was a little overdone. Another element that wasn’t unexpected was optimism about recovery and stories of people doing really well. There was plenty of acknowledgement that things have been hard in the past tense, but there wasn’t a lot of present tense struggling conveyed. As a present-tense-struggler myself, I found it a bit unbalanced, but I think probably a lot of the people who end up reading this book will like the recovery emphasis.

At over 400 pages, this book is a serious commitment. The length and the lack of focus and structure don't make a great combination; it tends to promote skimming, which takes away from the power of some of the interviewees’ contributions.

I can see this book being useful for family members who are looking to learn as much as they can about what this whole mental illness thing is about, and that’s probably the main target audience that NAMI is aiming for. It’s probably going to be less useful for people who’ve been around the block a few times dealing with their own illness.


I received a reviewer copy from the publisher through Netgalley.

Therapists who work with clients who struggle with attachment issues can benefit from this tool. I appreciate the tools assembled when I need a resource at my fingertips. Many of the ideas are practical. A therapist should read the book before working with a client, so that they are prepared, open, and on the same page! In the absence of our clients' best interests, we do an injustice to them!

Thank you NetGalley, Zando Projects, and NAMI (the National Alliance on Mental Illness) for the eARC in exchange for an honest review. I was just approved for this advance copy and, as a young woman who both suffers from anxiety, depression, and panic attacks and is also a strong advocate for mental health education, I’m very excited for this educational resource to be released. As we celebrate National Mental Health Awareness Month this May, I hope to continue to use my platform to help raise awareness & work to remove the stigma surrounding mental health issues through the spotlighting of great educational resources and diverse reads such as this. FULL REVIEW COMING SOON.

As a public librarian, I have had a long-standing relationship with my community's local NAMI chapter. They provide mental health programming for our patrons and, pre-pandemic, we provided meeting space for their support groups. Their knowledge has been invaluable in helping us learn to better interact with many of our patrons in crisis. I would have purchased this title sight-unseen but I was pleased to have the opportunity to view three chapters of it pre-publication. It is a tall order to produce a book that hopes to be a "comprehensive guide" for individuals and families dealing with mental health issues. The plan is a four-part book covering diagnosis, recovery, family, and best practices--19 chapters (Baker & Taylor says 368 pages). The writing is very clear and intended for the lay reader. The Best Practices section features a Q & A section with answers from noted experts. (Chapter 17 was one of the chapters provided for preview). I very much look forward to reading this book in its entirety and having it as a resource for my patrons.