BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel

Put Your Brain Back on Track

The second “u” in Unf#ck Your Brain: Using Science to Get Over Anxiety, Depression, Anger, Freak-Outs, and Triggers (Microcosm Publishing) is represented by a puzzle piece, a motif that’s cleverly echoed in the book’s design, from chapter headings to an “endpapers” effect on the inside covers. It offers a useful clue as to how the book works. Author Faith Harper, a therapist, sexologist, and clinical nutritionist, breaks down the way our brains work into simple terms anyone can grasp, then shows how things go wrong, be it from trauma, chemical imbalance, or other factors. And then? Let the unf#ckening begin!

Oh, wait. There’s the matter of that first word. The book leads with it and is profane throughout; if that’s a dealbreaker for you, be forewarned. It may be worth it if it brings more people to treatment, though. The stigma around mental health issues makes them not just sensitive but nearly taboo. When Terry Gross interviewed Jordan Peele about his horror film “Get Out,” she asked about a scene when the African-American protagonist receives hypnotherapy from a white female therapist. Peele said that during screenings of the film he would hear black audience members murmuring, “Nuh-uh, nope, get out,” adding that in his experience when the subject of psychiatry is raised with black people, they’re more likely to suggest church as a more viable option. Harper not only swears like a sailor but identifies as a woman of color and intersectional feminist. Keeping the language casual to the point of f-bombing feels on some level like a way to ensure the doors are wide open to anyone willing to so much as peek inside.

Once those hurdles are cleared, there’s a ton of useful information to be found here. Harper breaks down basic brain function, then shows how trauma fuses all the worst connections more tightly, and why that can lead to symptoms as diverse as panic, anger, depression, and that monster, PTSD. The bad news will surprise very few: These problems are all prevalent in our society and made worse by the various cultural prohibitions mentioned above, as well as the insistence by some that asking for help is somehow unmasculine. If you can tune out that noise, though, there’s hope. The brain can be retrained to work for you and not against you. Therapy can help but is not always needed. Ditto for prescription meds. And there are enough things to try right within these pages to give a reader a head-start on the path to holistic wellness.

Yeah, there’s the obvious stuff nobody wants to hear (get a good night’s sleep and don’t live on coffee and Red Vines), but if you’re starting from a place littered with bad habits, good news! You don’t have to quit them right out of the box; it’s easier to start a new habit than kick an established one, so adding a few glasses of water a day and some time outside in the fresh air can be a gentle starting point. A panic attack can shut a person down dangerously fast, but there are hacks here that can at least get a body breathing again (Quick! Name 10 of your favorite albums! Too easy? Name them alphabetically by artist!), and sometimes that’s all that’s needed. Readers who like a little more structure to their self-help will be pleased to know there’s an Unf#ck Your Brain Workbook (sold separately); it doesn’t cover much additional ground, but it’s nice to have exercises at the ready and all in one place, with space for notes and responses.

Mental health issues are scary; nobody likes to feel that loss of control, and asking for help can make it worse at the outset because it requires us to be vulnerable. This is why books are great; they offer you the chance to explore in private and filter the material, pulling out what’s useful and discarding the rest. Yet most books about mental health are either clinical (i.e., written for practitioners) or fall into the dangerously nebulous “self-help” category. While helping yourself is great, there are two problems associated with these books. First, many of them are garbage designed to take your money and offer simple bromides in exchange. Second, of the credible books out there, many take the notion of self help to a rather bootstrappy extreme, as in, Only You can help yourself, which is simply ridiculous. You may get what you need from a book, but you might also want to talk to a therapist or psychiatrist, and you might benefit from medication. Unf#ck Your Brain suggests all this at the outset; Harper empowers readers to make these decisions in their own best interest, which in itself is a vital step on the way to feeling better.

Heather Seggel is a writer based in Mendocino County, Calif, but sadly not the pretty coastal part. Email heatherlseggel@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, June 15, 2018

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