Sweet Distress: How our love affair with feelings has fuelled the current mental health crisis (and what we can do about it)

Cutting its way through the media frenzy and over-sentimentality surrounding the mental health crisis, Sweet Distress puts emotional wellbeing and resilience centre stage while exposing the true cause of the growing mental health crisis: an overemphasis on talking about feelings and emotions.

Author and psycholinguistic consultant Gillian Bridge puts forward a compelling argument that wallowing in emotions and feelings is exactly what we shouldn't be doing if we want to improve our mental health as it leads to self-indulgence, short-term fixes and a very unhealthy lifestyle.

There is no doubt that people are really suffering but what we need to do to alleviate this suffering is to build resilience, put our brains in charge of our feelings and look outwards, not inwards.

The book covers: stress, loneliness, anxiety, depression, body image (including eating disorders), social media, substance abuse, behavioural disorders, perfectionism, academic pressures and bullying.

Gillian looks at how these issues have led to apparently insurmountable emotional problems, and takes a few potshots at some of the things that have contributed to turning life events that may, at other times or in other places (perhaps more resilient ones?), have been little more than nuisances or inconveniences into sources of genuine psychic pain.

Packed with realistic and effective takeaway strategies for parents and educators, Sweet Distress challenges under-researched but over-promoted ideology and provides real, evidence-based help and advice for anyone wanting to improve the mental health of those they care about.

Suitable for parents, educators, counsellors and therapists.