Graphic Medicine

Available online
What is the difference between fear and excitement and how can you tell them apart? How do the mind and body make emotions? When can anxiety be good? This science-based graphic book addresses these questions and more, revealing just how strange anxiety is, but also how to unravel its mysteries and relieve its effects.

Available in print at the Health Science Center Library
Meet Dr. Iwan James: cyclist, doctor, would-be lover, former heavy metal fan, and, above all, human being. Weighed down by his responsibilities--from diagnosing personality disorders to deciding who can hold a gun license--he doubts his ability to make decisions about the lives of others when he may need more than a little help himself. Cartoonist and doctor Ian Williams introduces us to Iwan's troubled life as all humanity, it seems, passes through his surgery doors.

Available in print at the Health Science Center Library
Here's the skinny: After a lifetime of yo-yo dieting with pills, hypnosis, and ill-informed half-measures, Carol Lay finally shed her excess pounds and kept them off. Now this California cartoonist shares her experiences in a funny, genuine, and eye-popping graphic memoir that tells Carol's story and shows you how you can do it, too.

Available in print at the Health Science Center Library
In her first memoir, New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast brings her signature wit to the topic of aging parents. Spanning the last several years of their lives and told through four-color cartoons, family photos, and documents, and a narrative as rife with laughs as it is with tears, Chast's memoir is both comfort and comic relief for anyone experiencing the life-altering loss of elderly parents.

Available in print at the Health Science Center Library
This compelling case study in the form of a graphic novel vividly explores a year's therapy sessions as a search for understanding and truth. Told in a witty and thought-provoking manner, each engagingly illustrated scene is accompanied by deft commentary.

Available in print at the Health Science Center Library- ask at the front desk!
This colorful graphic novel adventure through the brain demystifies and destigmatizes emotional and mental health for children through accessible language and lessons. Join author-illustrator Cara Bean in Here I Am, I Am Me, as she takes readers on an illustrated journey to the center of the brain.

Available in print at the Health Science Center Library
Poetic musings on illness and the art of getting by from a mini-comics master The Hospital Suite is a landmark work by the celebrated cartoonist and small-press legend John Porcellino--an autobiographical collection detailing his struggles with illness in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Available in print at the Health Science Center Library
A beautiful and heart-wrenching young adult graphic novel takes a look at eating disorders, family dynamics, and ultimately, a journey to self-love. Valerie Chu is quiet, studious, and above all, thin. No one, not even her best friend Jordan, knows that she has been binging and purging for years. But when tragedy strikes, Val finds herself taking a good, hard look at her priorities, her choices, and her own body.

Available in print at the Health Science Center Library
Allie Brosh's Hyperbole and a Half showcases her unique voice, leaping wit, and her ability to capture complex emotions with deceptively simple illustrations. Every time Allie Brosh posts something new on her hugely popular blog Hyperbole and a Half the internet rejoices. This full-color, beautifully illustrated edition features more than fifty percent new content, with ten never-before-seen essays and one wholly revised and expanded piece as well as classics from the website like, "The God of Cake," "Dogs Don't Understand Basic Concepts Like Moving," and her astonishing, "Adventures in Depression," and "Depression Part Two," which have been hailed as some of the most insightful meditations on the disease ever written.

Available in print at the Health Science Center Library
Eisner Award nominated author Bex Ollerton--known as @Schnumn to her thousands of followers--is a talented comic artist who feels energized and courageous on some days and exhausted and emotionally depleted on others. In Lavender Clouds, she translates her experiences with Autism, ADHD, and mental health into a series of colorful, emotionally resonant comics that tell stories of neurodiversity and resilience.

Available in print at the Health Science Center Library
Cartoonist Ellen Forney explores the relationship between "crazy" and "creative" in this graphic memoir of her bipolar disorder, woven with stories of famous bipolar artists and writers.

Available in print at the Health Science Center Library
Equally humorous and horrific, Monsters explores the physical and emotional traumas of learning to live, and love again, with herpes.

Available in print at the Health Science Center Library
A poignant look at one woman's fight with depression, which is by turns funny, tender, heart-breaking and uplifting and will resonate with all who have been affected by depression. Through expressively scrawled drawings and commentary, Elizabeth Swados gives the reader an intimate glance into the illness that controlled her life.

Available in print at the Health Science Center Library
Psychiatric Tales draws on Darryl Cunningham's time working in a psychiatric ward to give a reasoned and sympathetic look into the world of mental illness. In each chapter, Cunningham explores a different mental health problem, using evocative imagery to describe the experience of mental illness, both from the point of view of those beset by illness and their friends and relatives.

Available in print at the Health Science Center Library
In her early twenties in New York City, diagnosed with bipolar disorder, Rachel Lindsay takes a job in advertising in order to secure healthcare coverage for her treatment. But work takes a strange turn when she is promoted onto the Pfizer account and suddenly finds herself on the other side of the curtain, developing ads for an anti-depressant drug.

Available online
Sobriety: A Graphic Novel offers an inside look to recovery from the perspectives of five Twelve Step group members, each with a unique set of addictions, philosophies, struggles, and successes while working the Steps.

Available in print at the Health Science Center Library
Part memoir, part self-help book, So Much For Love offers hilarious and empathetic advice on how to survive a relationship with a master manipulator. Sophie had always been cynical about love--until she meets Marcus. His affection and doting praise melt away her defenses. The beginning of their relationship was a whirlwind romance, but over time she finds herself on uneven footing. Marcus lies. He's violently angry and bewilderingly inconsistent. Yet somehow he always manages to explain away his behavior and to convince Sophie that it's all in her head. The whiplash of this toxic relationship has Sophie's head spinning. When she hits rock bottom, she fights her way out with fierce honesty, irreverent humor, and the help of Chocolat, a wisecracking, booze-drinking bear.

Available online
What is trauma? How does it change the way our brains work? And how can we overcome it? This unique comic explains the strange nature of trauma and how it confuses the brain and affects the body. With wonderful artwork, cat and mouse metaphors, essential scientific facts, and a healthy dose of wit, the narrator reveals how trauma resolution involves changing the body's physiology and describes techniques that can achieve this, including Trauma Releasing Exercises that allow the body to shake away tension, safely releasing deep muscular patterns of stress and trauma.

Available in print at the Health Science Center Library and Library West
The initial stages of B.D.'s recovery from losing a leg in Iraq were dramatically portrayed in The Long Road Home: One Step at a Time, but his healing journey was far from over. As this powerful sequel shows, the "war within" can be a long and lonely struggle, hardly the life of a "glamorous amputee" imagined by his daughter's jealous classmate. With his coaching job at Walden re-secured and the marathon PT sessions paying off, B.D.'s return to normalcy seems to be progressing well. But those who love him see alarming signs of trouble, namely anger and alcohol.