Reasons to Stay Alive by Matt Haig review – one man’s battle with depression

A timely memoir of mental illness reads as a highly personal and creative response to crisis

Matt Haig: ‘As therapy shows, words can be medicine’

Reasons to Stay Alive, the novelist’s book about his own depression, was much easier to write than to live through, he explains

Spark Joy: An Illustrated Guide to the Japanese Art of Tidying by Marie Kondo – digested read

‘A stray sock on the floor can end in coats piled on a chair … sometimes even in death’

In a Different Key: The Story of Autism by John Donvan and Caren Zucker – review

A frustratingly ambiguous history of autism sheds controversial new light on the actions of Hans Asperger

Do we really need more guides to mindfulness?

From Ruby Wax to poetry anthologies, 2016 brings a glut of mindfulness titles. But does the art of living in the here and now require so many special guides?

Robert Spitzer obituary

Psychiatrist who transformed the ‘world bible’ of psychiatric diagnosis

Unforbidden Pleasures review – taking liberties

Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips’s study of desire and restraint asks more questions than it answers

Your Beauty Mark: The Ultimate Guide to Eccentric Glamour by Dita Von Teese – digested read

‘Mais non! I have just noticed that I have yet again failed to get dressed – all I am wearing is stockings!’

John Forrester obituary

Historian and philosopher who wrote extensively on Freud and psychoanalysis

NeuroTribes by Steve Silberman review – an enlightened take on autism and difference

This sparklingly humane book makes the case that there is no such thing as neurologically ‘normal’