What if everything you've been taught about human nature is wrong? What if the cynicism baked into our institutions, our media, our parenting, and even our therapy models is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of who we are? These are the questions Rutger Bregman tackles in his book Humankind: A Hopeful History, and their implications for mental health are profound and far-reaching.

Terry Real's book Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship offers a radical challenge to how we've been taught to think about relationships, mental health, and personal growth in contemporary Western culture.

Kasia Urbaniak's Unbound: A Woman's Guide to Power is one of those rare books that makes you realize how deeply you've internalized frameworks that work against you. Drawing from her unusual background as both a Taoist nun and a professional dominatrix, Urbaniak offers a radical reimagining of power—particularly for women, but with implications that ripple across all gender identities and expressions.

What we believe about people becomes how people behave, including ourselves. This is the nocebo effect writ large, and understanding it might be one of the most important mental health interventions available to us.