Books like Brain Energy

01

The Body Keeps the Score

Bessel van der Kolk · Psychology

The Body Keeps the Score is Bessel van der Kolk's account of four decades spent studying and treating trauma, from Vietnam veterans at the VA in the 1970s to survivors of childhood abuse, accidents, and domestic violence.

A kindred health read.

02

Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To

David A. Sinclair · Science

Lifespan opens with a bold claim: aging is not an inevitable feature of biology but a disease — one that can be treated, slowed, and possibly reversed.

A kindred health read.

03

The Brain That Changes Itself

Norman Doidge · Psychology

Norman Doidge is a Canadian psychiatrist who traveled to interview the scientists and patients at the frontier of neuroplasticity research in the mid-2000s.

A kindred health read.

04

The Case Against Sugar

Gary Taubes · Health

The Case Against Sugar is Gary Taubes's focused argument that sugar — sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup specifically — is the primary cause of the obesity and diabetes epidemics, and the likely driver of the cluster of diseases, from heart disease to Alzheimer's, that researchers now associate with insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome.

A kindred health read.

05

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

Atul Gawande · Health

Being Mortal is Atul Gawande's investigation into why modern medicine is so bad at helping people die well.

A kindred health read.

06

Anatomy of an Epidemic

Robert Whitaker · Health

Anatomy of an Epidemic is Robert Whitaker's investigation into a paradox: as the use of psychiatric medication in the United States has increased dramatically over the past half-century, the number of people on disability due to mental illness has risen in parallel.

Shares mental illness and psychiatry with Brain Energy.

07

The Psychopath Test

Jon Ronson · Psychology

Jon Ronson is a journalist who starts investigating a strange series of anonymous books sent to academics around the world, and ends up spending a year exploring psychopathy, the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, and the question of whether the diagnostic categories psychiatry uses are tools for understanding people or labels that do damage of their own.

Shares mental illness and psychiatry with Brain Energy.

08

The Circadian Code

Satchin Panda · Health

Satchin Panda is a professor at the Salk Institute and one of the leading researchers in circadian biology — the science of how biological processes in every cell follow a roughly 24-hour clock.

Both dig into metabolism.

09

The Noonday Demon

Andrew Solomon · Health

The Noonday Demon is Andrew Solomon's exhaustive, literary account of depression — his own experience of it, its science and treatment history, its cultural and political dimensions, and the lives of people living with it across the world.

Both dig into psychiatry.

10

A Beautiful Mind

Sylvia Nasar · Biography

Sylvia Nasar's biography of the mathematician John Nash — Nobel laureate, game theory pioneer, and paranoid schizophrenic — is one of the finest accounts of genius and mental illness in biographical literature.

Both dig into mental illness.

11

Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry

Randolph M. Nesse · Psychology

Randolph Nesse spent forty years as a psychiatrist and evolutionary biologist asking a question most of his colleagues found strange: why did natural selection leave us so vulnerable to anxiety, depression, and other forms of suffering?

Both dig into psychiatry.

12

Norwegian Wood

Haruki Murakami · Literary fiction

Norwegian Wood is Murakami's most straightforwardly realist novel and his most personal — a coming-of-age story set in late 1960s Tokyo, narrated by Toru Watanabe, who is recalling the year he was nineteen and the two women who shaped him.

Both dig into mental illness.