Penny’s Triumphant Turnaround by Stacey MacLean, illustrated by Danelle Vautour

One is never too old for a picture book. Penny’s Triumphant Turnaround by Stacey MacLean, illustrated by Danelle Vautour, is a picture book with a difference.

Cover of Ups and Downs. A drawing of a woman carrying a girl by piggyback on a yellow background.

UPS and DOWNS by Nancy MacNairn and illustrated by Doruntina Beqiraj

She reads them beautiful stories and loves them very much giving them lots of hugs and kisses. But she suffers from Ups and Downs. Some days she has so much energy that she is up all night doing laundry, some days she has no energy and spends the day in bed.

The Suicide Tourist by Myna Wallin

Wallin leaves no stone unturned in this collection, probing her memories to figure out what was real and what wasn’t, as well as coming to terms with being an unreliable narrator of her own life, and what it means to be disabled in a world that has yet to accept the less “challenging” forms of mental illness.

Scream Therapy: A Punk Journey through Mental Health by Jason Schreurs

Scream Therapy: A Punk Journey through Mental Health follows the transformational journeys of Schreurs and the other punks he learns from, revealing the healing power of a misunderstood and underestimated music community.

A Life Spent Listening by Hassan Khalili

In A Life Spent Listening, Dr. Hassan Khalili reflects on four decades of being a frontline community psychotherapist and shares the wisdom he has learned over the years. By inviting the reader into his own life and the lives of his patients, Dr. Khalili explores the human condition and explains his concept of the grid as a guiding principle in his psychological practice.

Invisible Wounds: The emotional journey of a police officer’s battle with PTSD by Norm DeVarennes

This book explains how a shy small town boy’s mental health changed as he progressed into his policing career. The author analyzes his career path of how he gradually changed during his career as a police officer confronting all of the types of calls mentioned above amongst others. That his changes to his mental health were so subtle that he didn’t notice of the damages done to his mental health until it was almost too late.

Black Cop: My 36 years in police work, and my career ending experiences with official racism by Calvin Lawrence, With Miles Howe

The title and subtitle pretty much sum up what this book is about: being black and facing systemic racism in two police organizations in a 36-year career. Calvin Lawrence was born in 1949 in Yarmouth and raised in Halifax. His parents (he was actually raised by his Uncle and Aunt) were a mixed-race couple living …

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