The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants

The essential guide to mental health from the bestselling author of The School of Life This is a book about getting unwell. About losing direction and hope. About imagining that we have let ourselves and everyone down. But it is also a book about getting better. About regaining the thread, rediscovering meaning and finding a way back to connection and joy. Here, Alain de Botton follows the arc of a mental health journey, from crisis to recuperation; the moments we realize we cannot cope; the acts of selfcare or therapy in which we find respite; and the days we finally reclaim a sense of stability. Written with understanding and kindness, it is both a source of companionship in our loneliest moments - whether it's a relationship breakdown, a career setback or anxiety around the everyday - and a practical guide that will help us find reasons for hope. We are all on our own journey towards recovery. This book is for anyone ready to understand theirs. 'Alain de Botton is a brave and highly intelligent writer' Observer 'One of our most consistently illuminating writers on contemporary culture' John Gray, New Statesman Alain de Botton's redemptive volume charts a course from collapse to recovery with kindness, compassion and wisdom."Alain de Botton, one of our era's most uncommonly perceptive, lyrical, and lucid existential contemplatives." — The MarginalianA Therapeutic Journey follows the arc from mental crisis and collapse, to convalescence and recovery. Written with kindness, knowledge and sympathy, it is both a practical guide and a source of consolation and companionship in what might be some of our loneliest, most anguished moments.In this blueprint for enduring a period of mental anguish, Alain de Botton explores how we can cope with a variety of forms of mental pain and illness, from the mild to the severe. It considers how and why we might become ill; how we can explain things to friends, family and colleagues; how we can find our ways towards recovery; and how we can build resilience, so as to live wisely alongside our...