What to read after In Search of Happiness: Healing Through Mental Health Poetry?

A Rare, Restorative Take on Mental Health For Challenging Times

Poetry has way of connecting directly to the heart, and that's especially true with this poetry book about mental health and mental illness.

It's too simplistic to label this as depression poetry or anxiety poetry--this is poetry about what it means to be a human being struggling and coping with everyday mental health issues.

This is self love poetry. This is poetry for people who don't like poetry or have never even read it before.

Here's an example of the poetry you'll find:

You Can't Write Poetry About Depression

You can’t write poetry about depression

You have to feel it

It has to seep out of your bones

It has to leak out of your eyes

The poetry is in the becoming

the shifting feeling

the falling breath

the terror of monotony

the naked desperation

the losing of hope

and the long wondering if it will ever return

You can’t write poetry about depression

You have to experience it

You have to know it like a brother

And you have to hate it

so much that

you use it

you terrorize it

for what it d`id to you

Until you see the sudden strength

hidden within the darkness

Until you become the darkness

and in so doing

you realize

you’ve always had the light

Before he became a social worker, a writer/poet, and a mental health advocate tweeting for 31,000 followers, and before he started writing the popular weekly email newsletter, The Mental Health Update, Jordan Brown was terrified and lost.

Forced to respond to a parent's mental health crisis right after graduating from college, Jordan made decisions he never thought he would have to make.

This experience of feeling completely unprepared to deal with mental health issues led him, after giving back to others in the Peace Corps in Guatemala and in AmeriCorps in Montana, to seek out and take the 12-week Family-to-Family course with the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI).

A year later, he was teaching the Family-to-Family course and starting a family support group in Helena, Montana to help others deal with their own mental health crises.

But everything changed in 2012. A year before finding mental health resources and a supportive community with NAMI in 2013, a 24-year-old Jordan was rushed into sudden open-heart surgery to repair a failing aortic valve.

Surprisingly, the physical recovery from this near-death experience was nothing compared to the emotional recovery that wreaked havoc on his life by worsening anxiety and OCD symptoms that began in childhood. Mental illness caused months of insomnia and progressed to severe depression and worsening suicidal thoughts.

It is out of these experiences that In Search of Happiness was born.

Three years in the making, this mental health poetry book carries the reader along a four-part journey through overcoming anxiety and relieving societal pressure, to receiving healing and, ultimately, finding meaning.

With special emphasis on anxiety and depression, In Search of Happiness examines the vast spectrum from mental illness to mental health. At its core, the book of poems addresses the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual reality that is the everyday mental health experience.

It's not only a book about depression poetry or anxiety poetry. It's life-affirming poetry that helps others create their own meaning.

And it's not just one person's story as much as it is a collective mental-health story emerging from one person's experience.

In Search of Happiness is a vulnerable collection of poetry and short essays that encourages the reader to see mental health in a new, more hopeful light.

This is not the doom-and-gloom narrative that scares society and spreads stigma. This poetry-and-prose collection increases mental health awareness by highlighting the entire mental health spectrum on which we all exist.