A Better Day: Your Positive Mental Health Handbook

Dr Alex George is the government’s specially appointed Youth Mental Health Ambassador, and clearly cares passionately about helping young people with depression, loneliness, gender identity, stress, loss and body positivity among a raft of other common issues.

Rather than be a book about defeating mental illness, Dr George poses this helpful and practical book as about creating mental wellness and healthy strategies and routines. In part three of the book (“A Better Day”) there’s useful advice about maintaining a healthy diet, being creative, sleeping well and developing resilience and mental strength to be able to deal with the problems that come as part of life.

This is an ideal book for children in Year 7 and 8 who may be experiencing crushes, puberty and difficulties with social media, as all these things are touched on as well as gender identity, eating disorders and developing sexuality. Each subject is dealt with sensitively and inclusively, and the book provides a general overview to a lot of different topics. Therefore, if you were looking for more detailed guidance and information for young people in your life about one particular issue – depression, for instance – then you might be better off finding something that could cover the subject in more depth.

An upbeat and positive book which feels perfectly pitched at lower secondary school kids and will no doubt be hugely helpful for many.