(Replaces Mental Wellbeing)

Research suggests that mental disorders affect one in four people, yet stigmas around mental disorders continue. Mental Health gives an overview of some chronic mental illnesses and looks at the difficulties we have in dealing with them — especially when friends or relatives are affected. This book also covers the common psychological difficulties that can affect any of us about how to deal with mental problems and how to get help.

Key Facts;  Glossary;  Additional Resources;  Index

Following the death of her brilliant mathematician father (whom she sacrificed college to care for), twenty-five-year-old Catherine is left in limbo, struggling to come to terms with his legacy. Inheriting some of both his genius and his instability, she is torn between her pushy successful sister, Claire, who wants to take her back to New York, and Hal, a former student of her father's, who shows up even before the funeral wanting to root through the countless notebooks her father kept in the years of his decline, hoping to find mathematical gold. Catherine does not want to leave, and things become more complicated as she and Hal tentatively begin to develop a relationship. She gives him the key to a drawer in her father's desk, where the “gold” waits in the form of a notebook filled with the most original and astonishing mathematical proof Hal has seen in years. Thrilled, he wants to take immediate steps to have the proof published in her father's name, until Catherine shocks both him and Claire by declaring that she is its author. Hal (who has his own ambitions) is incredulous and Clair doubts her claims and even her sanity. What “proof” does Catherine have? Among the themes here are the elusiveness of genius, the difficulty of a mathematical proof, the uncertainties of love and trust, and the nature of personal integrity. David Auburn's play won the Pullitzer Prize. (83 pages)
Level: A/B/Interdisciplinary projects with mathematics etc.

Chapter One: Self-Injury
Understanding self-harm, Self-harm and young people, Teenagers’ epidemic of self-harm, Girls and self-harm, Myths and stereotypes, Hurting themselves, Talking about self-harm, My self-harm story, Truth hurts, Self-harm and Scotland’s older people, Stop self-harming, Minimising self-harm damage, Health professionals ‘misunderstand self-harm’, Self-harm and suicide.

Chapter Two: Suicide
Suicide and attempted suicide, Suicide advice, The warning signs of suicide, Lowest suicide rate since records began, One life lost every 40 seconds, Gender split in suicide risk factors, One in seven ‘contemplates suicide’, Scotland has the highest suicide rates in Britain, Suicides, New drive to reduce suicide rate for young men, Suicide and the media, Suicide websites, Internet suicide pacts.

Key Facts;  Glossary;  Additional Resources;  Index

(Replaces Coping with Stress) The biggest threat to the health of the workforce — young people and rising exam pressures — what is being done to help people cope with the increasing pressures of everyday life.

This is the intense and moving story of a life stolen, and reclaimed. Attitudes to mental illness have changed over the years — not so long ago young women could be “sectioned” simply for being what most parents term ‘a handful.’ The heroine of Maggie O’Farrell’s heartbreaking novel is one such teenager. Spirited, intelligent and stifled by 1930s upper-class life, Esme Lennox’s refusal to conform leads to 60 years in a mental institution. She is edited out of her family’s history. The novel slowly pieces together the story of her stolen life when Lennox is finally released into the care of her great-niece Iris, a young woman equally unwilling to toe the line but born into more liberal times. The story that emerges is a heartbreaking tale of two sisters in colonial India and 1930s Edinburgh — of the loneliness that binds them together and the rivalries that drive them apart, and lead one of them to betray the other. Above all it is the story of Esme, a fiercely intelligent, unconventional young woman, and of the terrible price she is made to pay for her family's unhappiness and her refusal to follow the rules of polite society. Switching between pre-war and modern-day Edinburgh, O’Farrell shows that, while the methods may have become more subtle, women are still pushed in the direction of ‘acceptable behaviour’.  (277 pages)
Level: 2nd and 3rd year of the Gymnasium