Book Review: Headcase: LGBTQ Writers and Artists on Mental Health and Wellness

Headcase: LGBTQ Writers and Artists on Mental Health and Wellness. Edited by Stephanie Schroeder and Teresa Theophano, Oxford University Press, ISBN: 978-0-190-84659-6, New York, NY, 2019, 328 pages, $29.95.

    Stephanie Schroder and Teresa Theophano present an authentic and inspiring collection of personal stories that are at the core of what mental health and wellness is comprised of on many levels within the LGBTQ community. Readers will not have seen a book like this. It is the first of its kind to have the intersection between multiple identities and present mental health conflicts for both providers and clients.

    Headcase: LGBTQ Writers and Artists on Mental Health and Wellness is a well-edited book featuring an array of authors who speak candidly about their experience on mental health, wellness, and identity. Each vignette captures a different experience that provokes great thought and reflection, and invites the reader to navigate through the stories with an open mind and heart. The stories invoke many feelings and emotions, but collectively they offer a strong message around perseverance and strength. It’s an especially important book that seamlessly integrates the experiences of practitioners and clients to provide a more detailed and personal firsthand account.

    Headcase is structured in four parts: Part I: Conversations About Mental Health and Wellness, Part II: Stories of Survival, Part III: Encounters of the Mad Kind, and Part IV: Pushing Boundaries. The contributors of the stories that are arranged within these four parts span many areas of the mental health community: students, writers, advocates, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, nurses, yogis, and the list goes on.  

    Many of them also identify with the LGBTQ community. The stories the authors present take on a life of their own and highlight the struggle of confronting a mental health crisis and learning how to manage. These authors once too struggled with their own mental health conflicts and found ways to heal and extend that health to the greater LGBTQ community.  A few contributors expressed their experience through comic drawings, paintings, and drawings. Throughout the text and drawings, a common theme emerges: a shift in bringing multiple identities together to share a common struggle.  In the book’s foreword, Kai Cheng Thom speaks to the significance of a collective narrative among fearless individuals.

    Headcase is more than a collection of stories and artistic work.  It’s a resource for mental health professionals, educators, and students to learn and connect with future clients.  The book could not be timelier and has inspired more LGBTQ literature around mental health and wellness.  More than anything, the book provides a voice to a community that has often been disregarded and misunderstood.

    I encourage mental health professionals to use this book as an additional lens through which to learn more about the connection of mental health/wellness and the LGBTQ community. I strongly believe this literature can help influence further visibility within the LGBTQ community and begin to bridge existing gaps within mental health care.

Reviewed by Joshua M. Sanchez, MSW candidate at Columbia University School of Social Work.