Read of the week: The Hell Inside Our Heads

Brandon Fairweather

Tracey McDonald Publishers

Review: Linda Curling

If you’ve ever suffered through even one panic attack, you’ll be able to empathise with the author of The Hell Inside Our Heads. Fairweather has documented his mental health struggles frankly and honestly.

He recalls that his first experience of anxiety was in primary school, although he was too young to be able to name what he was going through.

He wrote this book to show fellow sufferers ‘that despite everything I have been through, ... I no longer experience the same severe spikes of panic.

I have learnt how to neutralise the threat to a degree, and, as a result, enjoy a much better quality of life.’As it turns out, the ‘everything’ he went through is more than most non-anxiety-prone people endure in a lifetime: open-heart surgery at the age of 28; medical emergencies caused by both extremes of blood-thinning medication side effects - clotting and uncontrolled bleeding; and to top it all, being diagnosed with cancer.

A personal journey

Fairweather’s marketing background comes through in his upbeat writing style, and subheadings within chapters make for easy reading in short spurts of time. This is particularly true for the chapters covering the physiology of anxiety, where bite-sized sections are less likely to intimidate readers who, like Fairweather, didn’t study biology to matriculate.

On the other hand, numerous take-home messages and ‘stand-out’ sentences are interspersed throughout the chapters in large font, a technique that I found more distracting than useful. That said, many take-home messages are noteworthy, such as ‘Anxiety is not something that you ‘beat’. It’s something you learn to understand and manage daily.’

And to help you do just that, chapters like ‘Finding equilibrium’ and ‘Movement is medicine’ offer a wealth of advice, drawn from the author’s personal experience; sufferers and their families will surely find plenty of useful information here.