Listen, Open Up, Connect: A Mental Health Expert's Advice On Living Through A Crisis

Terri Cheney did not expect she would be weathering the pandemic so well. The author of Modern Madness: An Owner's Manual has been living with mental illness her entire life. She realizes now, this has been good preparation for the impositions of 2020.

"With anxiety," she said, "you're used to feeling unpredictable and always being afraid of what's going to happen. With depression, there's that loss of interest in things, the lack of productivity, and the loss of hope for the future."

"That's what America is experiencing right now," she says, while "these are all traits that mentally ill people have learned how to deal with."

"It's very strange," she says, "like we've been in training."

Cheney, an entertainment lawyer turned mental health advocate, has put her decades of de facto training into a book that merges memoir — her familiar form from two previous books on living with bipolar disorder — with practical insights on topics including mental health diagnoses, the impact of mental illness on relationships, and coping skills (both good and bad).