Suicide Notes by Michael Thomas Ford

From Goodreads,

"I'm not crazy. I don't see what the big deal is about what happened. But apparently someone does think it's a big deal because here I am. I bet it was my mother. She always overreacts.

Fifteen-year-old Jeff wakes up on New Year's Day to find himself in the hospital. Make that the psychiatric ward. With the nutjobs. Clearly, this is all a huge mistake. Forget about the bandages on his wrists and the notes on his chart. Forget about his problems with his best friend, Allie, and her boyfriend, Burke. Jeff's perfectly fine, perfectly normal, not like the other kids in the hospital with him. Now they've got problems. But a funny thing happens as his forty-five-day sentence drags on: the crazies start to seem less crazy.

Compelling, witty, and refreshingly real, Suicide Notes is a darkly humorous novel from award-winning author Michael Thomas Ford that examines that fuzzy line between "normal" and the rest of us."

Goodreads - Suicide Notes

May is mental health awareness month.  I read quite a few books about mental health, because it is such a huge issue in society, but also because we deal with it day in and day out at school.  I think a lot of problems we have today would be eliminated if mental health had been addressed.  Either way I thought it would be fitting to end the month with a review of this book about mental health. 

This book starts with a young boy named Jeff waking up in a hospital.  At first he isn't sure where he is, but he comes to find out that he is in the psych ward because he tried to kill himself.  Jeff attends group therapy meetings with other young people and he meets with his therapist to hopefully find out why he tried to kill himself.  Jeff makes friends with the people there and the new people who transfer in.  Over time Jeff finds them a little less crazy and starts to figure out why he tried to kill himself.

One thing that drives me absolutely crazy is when I am reading a book and I lose track of time progression within the book.  For example, I read a book where kids were trapped in a school due to a snowstorm.  As the book progressed the snow got higher and higher, but there was a total loss of time.  I couldn't tell how much time had passed and it really affected how I felt about the book.  This book on the other hand had an interesting format.  Each chapter of the book was titled with the number of days that Jeff had been in the psych ward.  This made it super easy to keep up with how long Jeff had been in the hospital.  It also made it a kind of countdown toward when he was going to be released.  It also fit with the title of the book Suicide Notes because each chapter was just a brief highlight and snippet of Jeff's day. 

This book was very similar to other mental health books I've read recently.  I think I am getting really burnt out on the mental health theme, and I probably need to take a break from it.  I feel like all mental health books are exploring the exact same topics.  Everything revolves around a teenager trying to kill themselves and them coming to terms with what happened.  However, I feel that authors need to be exploring other mental health issues.  We need to explore anorexia, bulimia, schizophrenia, depression, etc.  There are so many issues out there and we really need to start delving into all of them, not just suicide.  I think that because this book explored the typical suicide path that I felt like I had already read this before. 

I was slightly disappointed in this book because it was a lot like others I have read.  I enjoyed the format of the book, but felt really exhausted on the entire storyline.  I give this 3 out of 5 stars.