Mental Health Awareness Week
Today is the start of Mental Health Awareness Week and I am helping to bring awareness to it.
Approximately one in four people in the world suffer from mental health problems each year. Mental Health Awareness Week aims to get people talking about their mental health and reduce the stigma that stops people from asking for help.
There are many types of mental illnesses: Anxiety disorders, including panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and phobias; depression, bipolar disorder, and other mood disorders; eating disorders; personality disorders; post-traumatic stress disorder; and psychotic disorders, including schizophrenia.
I am also re-sharing about a book I read last year that made my Top 10 list and deals with mental illness: A Breath too Late by Rocky Callen. I will also be sharing my review again.
Book Description:
For fans of Girl in Pieces, All the Bright Places, and Girl, Interrupted comes a haunting and breathtaking YA contemporary debut novel that packs a powerful message: hope can be found in the darkness.
Seventeen-year-old Ellie had no hope left. Yet the day after she dies by suicide, she finds herself in the midst of an out-of-body experience. She is a spectator, swaying between past and present, retracing the events that unfolded prior to her death.
But there are gaps in her memory, fractured pieces Ellie is desperate to re-assemble. There’s her mother, a songbird who wanted to break free from her oppressive cage. The boy made of brushstrokes and goofy smiles who brought color into a gray world. Her brooding father, with his sad puppy eyes and clenched fists. Told in epistolary-like style, this deeply moving novel sensitively examines the beautiful and terrible moments that make up a life and the possibilities that live in even the darkest of places. Perfect for fans of the critically-acclaimed Speak, I’ll Give You the Sun, and If I Stay.
My review originally posted on October 22, 2021:
A Breath Too Late begins with a trigger warning dealing with physical abuse, suicide, and depression. And it fully deals with these issues. After the trigger warning there is an author’s note and the novel ends with ways to reach out for help. Yes, when you read A Breath Too Late, you are in for a full-on emotional story with Ellie. This novel does not deal with a happy ending, and has a tragic story, but the reader is actually left with hope.
The novel is written in letters from Ellie to her mother, father, a very important boy, life, depression, and more. It is too late for Ellie, but it might not be for potential readers who Callen wrote this novel for: For those who have kept their pain and emotions a secret to all.
As the novel progresses, things become clear to Ellie that she could not see through her painful life. Through death, she did find peace as she saw how the two most important people to her actually felt about her.
This novel will bring so many thoughts and emotions to those who read it. It is a powerful one that I will stick on my shelf next to Just a Normal Tuesday, which also deals with suicide and greatly affected me. At the end of the novel the author gives contact information for those that may need some kind of assistance.
~~~
For more information on Mental Health Awareness Week, please click this link.
You can buy A Breath too Late here.
If you need help, please get it. You are worth it!
