About this item
An Economist Best Book of the YearEveryone accepts the importance of physical health; isn’t it just as important to aim for the mental equivalent? Philippa Perry has come to the rescue with How to Stay Sane -- a maintenance manual for the mind.Years of working as a psychotherapist showed Philippa Perry what approaches produced positive change in her clients and how best to maintain good mental health. In How to Stay Sane, she has taken these principles and applied them to self-help. Using ideas from neuroscience and sound psychological theory, she shows us how to better understand ourselves. Her idea is that if we know how our minds form and develop, we are less at the mercy of unknown unconscious processes. In this way, we can learn to be the master of our feelings and not their slave.
About the Author
After volunteering with the Samaritans, Philippa trained as a psychotherapist. She worked in the mental health field for several years before writing her graphic novel, Couch Fiction which lays bare the process of psychotherapy, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2010. Her second book, How to Stay Sane, was written for a series published by the School of Life and Pan Macmillan in 2012. Her third book, The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (And Your Children Will be Glad That You Did) will be published by Penguin Life in April 2019.As well as continuing her psychotherapy work with an organisation called Talk for Health, Philippa has presented several documentaries including: The Truth about Children Who Lie; The Age of Emotion; and Humiliation for BBC Radio 4. For Channel 4 she has presented the documentaries: Being Bipolar; and The Great British Sex Survey. For BBC4 she has written and presented: Truth Lies and Love Bites, a history of Agony Aunts, and How To Be A Surrealist with Philippa Perry. Along with this, Philippa also created a cartoon agony aunt series for Guardian Video and has contributed to many other radio and television programs.She lives in London with her husband the artist, Grayson Perry and they have a grown up daughter, the writer and illustrator, Flo Perry.
