YOU'RE NOT CRAZY

A therapist offers advice to readers with troubling behavioral problems in this self-help book.

Singer begins her wide-ranging overview of various mental problems—from anxiety to obsession and more pronounced issues like assorted forms of self-harm—with a simple encouragement to readers who may be experiencing such things or love somebody who is: You can do this. In her own practice helping patients, the author has employed a combination of cognitive behavioral therapy designed to help with the mental aspects of the problem and behavioral therapy calculated to change issue-causing environments. And in both cases, the initial aim is the same: to address the feeling of “stuckness” that exacerbates the anxiety from which so many of these thorny states arise. The goal, as the author winningly puts it, is to remove the need for her readers to see her or her professional colleagues at all. The main approach Singer takes to breaking down her material is inspired. She dramatizes patient experiences and encounters, using dialogue and other novelistic touches that succeed marvelously in making all of these problems seem at once more human and more treatable. These embellished case studies are then followed up with quick diagnostic discussions that feel more pointed because they’re dealing with fleshed-out individuals rather than clinical abstractions. One chapter shows readers a patient with an urge for ritualistic behaviors that accompanies obsessive-compulsive disorder, after which Singer addresses both the individual and the person’s partner. “As a partner of a loved one who suffers from ritualistic behavior, it is hard to view behaviors objectively,” she writes. “During treatment both individuals will learn new behaviors.” Whether the topic is agoraphobia, fetishism, or any number of different, unhealthy outgrowths of anxiety, the author provides an empathetic analysis without moral judgment, and always with an eye toward progress instead of stagnation. People experiencing some of these behavioral issues will find this book invaluable.

A sharply observant and richly sympathetic guide to conquering some persistent mental demons.