This book explores how mental illness is portrayed in 21st-century young adult fiction and how selected works can help teachers, librarians, and mental health professionals to more effectively address the needs of students combating mental illness. It offers extensive analysis of contemporary young adult fiction featuring youth with mental illness to help school and youth services librarians make informed collection development and readers' advisory decisions; examines the symptoms and warning signs of mental illness in adolescents in addition to how various disorders are diagnosed and treated; offers strategies for teachers and librarians to integrate quality texts into middle and high school curricula and into community initiatives aimed at confronting the stigma associated with mental illness; follows a standardized chapter format that makes it easy for readers to learn about the books and the mental illnesses they highlight; [and] provides an extended list of resources at the end of each chapter that includes additional young adult fiction and nonfiction as well as adult fiction texts.

We are seventeen and shattered and still dancing. We have messy, throbbing hearts, and we are stronger than anyone could ever know . . . Jonah never thought a girl like Vivi would come along. Vivi didn't know Jonah would light up her world. Neither of them expected a summer like this . . . a summer that would rewrite their futures. In an unflinching story about new love, old wounds, and forces beyond our control, two teens find that when you collide with the right person at just the right time, it will change you forever. “When We Collided is a book I wish could have written, but am so much better for having read." --Julie Murphy, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Dumplin'

For fans of Girl in Pieces, All the Bright Places, and Girl, Interrupted comes a haunting and breathtaking YA contemporary debut novel that packs a powerful message: hope can be found in the darkness. "Raw, heartbreaking, and poignant." —New York Times-bestselling author Kathleen Glasgow A Chicago Public Library and Kirkus Best Book of the Year! Seventeen-year-old Ellie had no hope left. Yet the day after she dies by suicide, she finds herself in the midst of an out-of-body experience. She is a spectator, swaying between past and present, retracing the events that unfolded prior to her death. But there are gaps in her memory, fractured pieces Ellie is desperate to re-assemble. There's her mother, a songbird who wanted to break free from her oppressive cage. The boy made of brushstrokes and goofy smiles who brought color into a gray world. Her brooding father, with his sad puppy eyes and clenched fists. And Ellie's determined to find out why a piece of her was left behind. Told in epistolary-like style, Rocky Callen's deeply moving A Breath Too Late sensitively examines the beautiful and terrible moments that make up a life and the possibilities that live in even the darkest of places. Perfect for fans of the critically-acclaimed Speak, I’ll Give You the Sun, and If I Stay. "An exquisitely played love song to life, in all of its hurts, wonders, memories, and loves." –Jeff Zentner, Morris Award winning author of The Serpent King and Goodbye Days "A haunting story, punctuated with brilliant points of hope and light. This is an important story. A necessary story . . . Callen’s writing radiates with passion, honesty and love." —National Book Award finalist and Printz Award–winning author An Na

National Book Award * Golden Kite Award Winner * Six Starred Reviews A captivating novel about mental illness that lingers long beyond the last page, Challenger Deep is a heartfelt tour de force by New York Times bestselling author Neal Shusterman. Caden Bosch is on a ship that's headed for the deepest point on Earth: Challenger Deep, the southern part of the Marianas Trench. Caden Bosch is a brilliant high school student whose friends are starting to notice his odd behavior. Caden Bosch is designated the ship's artist in residence to document the journey with images. Caden Bosch pretends to join the school track team but spends his days walking for miles, absorbed by the thoughts in his head. Caden Bosch is split between his allegiance to the captain and the allure of mutiny. Caden Bosch is torn. Challenger Deep is a deeply powerful and personal novel from one of today's most admired writers for teens. Laurie Halse Anderson, award-winning author of Speak, calls Challenger Deep "a brilliant journey across the dark sea of the mind; frightening, sensitive, and powerful. Simply extraordinary."

Finley, an unnaturally quiet boy who is the only white player on his high school's varsity basketball team, lives in a dismal Pennsylvania town that is ruled by the Irish mob, and when his coach asks him to mentor a troubled African American student who has transferred there from an elite private school in California, he finds that they have a lot in common in spite of their apparent differences.

Fostering Mental Health Literacy through Adolescent Literature provides educators a starting point for engaging students in the study of adolescent literature that features mental health themes with the intended goal of developing students’ mental health literacy while simultaneously attending to English Language Arts content and literacy standards. Each chapter, co-authored by a literacy expert and mental health specialist, features a specific adolescent novel and provides middle and high school teachers background information on the novel’s featured mental health theme(s), along with pedagogical approaches for guiding readers into, through, and out of the novel. In doing so, this text seeks to raise awareness of mental health issues thereby reducing associated stigma and normalizing individual and peer mental health experiences for all adolescents.

A searing look at the effects of post traumatic stress on soldiers and their families, seen through the eyes of teenage Hayley. Hayley is struggling to forget the past. But some memories run too deep, and soon the cracks start to show. Stunning, hard-hitting fiction from an award-winning writer.