Film, Books and Streaming Series: Our Most Popular Arts and Culture Stories

All that and more, gathered here. Enjoy!

From Fahrenheit 451 to Harry Potter, the power of fantasy fiction for youth mental health. Two young writers from Youthcast Media Group explore fantasy fiction’s soaring popularity during and after the pandemic and its importance to their own mental health. 

Young readers struggling with ‘reality overload’ drive surging sales of sci-fi and fantasy books. During the pandemic, “our worlds became very small, and fantasy fiction provided this vast opportunity to delve into worlds unknown.”

“Hope was still waiting for me:” Finding a sanctuary in fantasy fiction. “Watching the protagonists try to solve world-threatening problems made my own feel smaller and easier to handle.” Check out the young writer’s dazzling finish.

No illusion: Fantasy fiction is my safe space. “If Percy Jackson could handle a minotaur… then I can handle a few bullies,” writes author Hermes Falcon.

A master class in dysfunctional family dynamics: A look backward at Succession, a series about intergenerational trauma, horrible bosses, conniving colleagues and billionaires behaving badly. I didn’t watch it, actually, but I felt like I had after reading Sarah Henry’s incisive review.

Minecraft opens powerful new world for child and teen therapy. Play therapy is nearly 100 years old, but the idea of incorporating video games into therapy has surfaced over the last 15 years or so, to great success. Minecraft therapy has proven to be especially effective.

Turning Red: A quirky coming-of-age tale of breaking through intergenerational pain. In this 2022 Pixar film, a teenage girl learns to embrace her inner panda — the weird, emotional, creative, messy parts that lie within us all.

Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex and his decade of magical thinking. The memoir Spare, published in 2023, explores the young prince’s prolonged grief over the loss of his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, and his fervent belief that she was still alive years after her death.

“Donald Trump knew I was 13”: Among women, anxiety over Trump is turning to rage. “As the mother of a teenage daughter, one of the most wrenching aspects of Trump’s presidency is his vicious behavior toward women and girls.” 

TikTok’s fixation on dissociative identity disorder has exploded among teens. Researchers suggest healthcare providers should create more engaging content on #DID TikTok channels to counter the abundant misinformation about it online.

‘The Factory of Maladies’: A chilling first-hand account of life in a psych ward. This memoir, written by Deborah Hartung, is a gripping account of being locked up in a San Francisco psychiatric ward.

Does the series ‘Shrinking’ have any real-life therapists? Nah, they’re just playing them on-screen. The comedy series “Shrinking” was a runaway hit, but many psychologists say its message about therapy was fatally flawed.

When positivity becomes toxic. We are in the #GoodVibesOnly age, and it’s kind of a bummer. The book Toxic Positivity, by psychotherapist Whitney Goodman, points the way toward authenticity. 

Watching too much true crime can be bad for your mental health, experts say.  Some women who consume hours of true crime shows and podcasts have reported suffering from hypervigilance or a reluctance to leave the house, Youthcast Media Group reports. 

The case against spanking. Courtney Wise of MindSite News discusses why this once-ubiquitous punishment is harmful to kids and parents alike.

Parts unknown: Controversial documentary explores Anthony Bourdain’s life and death. The film shows how Bourdain’s public image contrasted with his private, shy, introverted self. 

We interrupt this program to bring you #BlackJoy. We Black people—Black Americans in this case—know hard times, but our lives also sparkle with joy. Black joy, and not just Black trauma, is our inheritance. 

On the Couch with TV’s Ted Lasso: Hit Soccer Show Champions Therapy. Hands up if you saw through Lasso’s cheery schtick for the coping mechanism and deflection that it was? Despite his hokey aphorisms and aw-shucks platitudes, Ted Lasso clearly had his own demons to deal with. 

Netflix Series Explores Preschooler Rx for Lonely Elders. This captivating series shows how intergenerational care can bring both the very old and the very young joy and comfort.

Stay True: Hua Hsu’s tender elegy to a lost friend resonates. The memoir Stay True is a powerful tribute to a friendship cut short by tragedy and to writing as a tool for survival. 

Batsh*t crazy: The creator of Wakefield draws on her own experience for psych ward drama. This streaming series set in an Australian psychiatric hospital explores mental health with humor, compassion and insider insight. 

A sad farewell to Jane Goodall. Her groundbreaking research on chimpanzees showed they experience and express emotions like grief and love, just like humans do.

Docile: Memoirs of a not-so-perfect Asian girl. Hyeseung Song tackles head on the expectations she faced growing up and the journey she had to make to find her self-worth. 

Curbing the overdose epidemic: An author’s call to drop our moralistic blinders and save lives. Author Maia Szalavitz makes a formidable case that embracing harm reduction will help end the opioid overdose epidemic. 

How I passed a test to be a grief therapist without really trying. As an investigative reporter, I wanted to see how hard it would be to game the system and pass the test without taking the course. It turned out to be ridiculously easy. — Astrid Landon

The Myth of Normal: Gabor Maté’s book explores childhood trauma’s devastating impact on people and our society – and what we can do to reverse the damage. 

‘My heart aches for you’: An excerpt fromThe Poet and The Silk Girl. This chapter highlights Dr. Satsuki Ina’s travels to Laredo, Texas with a group of Japanese American internment camp survivors and descendants to visit a shelter serving immigrant families just released from detention. 

From “Girl, Interrupted” to “Girl in Pieces”: What I learned from reading three books about teen mental illness. How books on teens with mental illness help destigmatize and educate us. 

Love in the ruins. Caring for her brilliant husband who developed early onset Alzheimer’s, Pru is isolated, exhausted and lonely. But she has no intention of sending him to a nursing home. 

“Danger Is At The Door:” A Latina Therapist on Counseling a Community Threatened By ICE. Bilingual therapist Mara Sammartino lets her Latino clients know it’s important to put on their own oxygen mask first. “Feeling suicidal is a perfectly valid response to what is happening now. Having thoughts of suicide, we’ve all experienced that. Let’s not say we haven’t.”

Michael Pollan on the ebbing drug war and the fast-growing era of psychedelic research. MindSite News editor Rob Waters sits down with author Michael Pollan in the garden of his Berkeley, California, home to discuss his book This is Your Mind on Plants. 

“There is only one bus”: Dr. Tom Insel reflects on a new path to mental health. As with the fight for civil rights or climate change, it’s going to take a movement, with families at the core of that effort. We need to reframe this crisis as more than a medical challenge: It is an issue of social justice.  

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