Picture this: Someone is screaming at you as loud as they can for 45 minutes straight. For most people, it would be the stuff of nightmares. For author Jason Schreurs and members of the punk rock community, it's therapy.
Scream Therapy: A Punk Journey through Mental Health follows the transformational journeys of Schreurs and the other punks he learns from, revealing the healing power of a misunderstood and underestimated music community. They come to a life-changing realizationpunk rock helped them at their lowest points and never left their sides. Coping with childhood sexual abuse and an undiagnosed mental health condition, Schreurs discovers punk rock as a youth and becomes part of its tight-knit scene. When a psychiatrist blindsides him with a bipolar diagnosis in his mid-40s, he embarks on a mental health discovery mission.
In Scream Therapy, musicians, advocates, activists, and fans prescribe the punk subculture as a catalyst for mental healtha place where it's okay to not be okay. Schreurs' attitude and conviction pogo-dance off the page as he and others in the book claw through their worst days, seek stability, and support each other to live better lives, all to the soundtrack of pissed-off music. Scream Therapy asks a crucial question. If punk rock can provide such therapy, why aren't more people screaming?
Praise for SCREAM THERAPY
"Ferocious and measured, riotous and open-hearted, Scream Therapy demystifies both punk rockthe music, the scene, the way of lifeand the mental health challenges that so often follow trauma."
NAOMI K. LEWIS, award-winning author of Tiny Lights for Travellers
"Schreurs' writing has intimacy and immediacy. It's candid and welcoming, and he convinces the reader to look inside their own badass punk self."
ELLEN FORNEY, New York Times best-selling author of Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me
"Scream Therapy is funny, rowdy, heartbreaking, and hopefula riveting memoir-plus about learning to heal and thrive, despite the twin cloaks of shame and silence our culture would like to drop over the prevalent issue of mental health."
COOPER LEE BOMBARDIER, author of Pass with Care: Memoirs
"Schreurs is an experienced and meticulous storyteller. He takes readers on a journey through the highs and lows of mental un-wellness, using his own struggles with bipolar. Scream Therapy is vivid, strikingly vulnerable, and transformative."
WANDA TAYLOR, educator and author of The Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children: The Hurt, the Hope, and the Healing