Coming soon! Books for kids, written by Chris Warren-Dickins, a psychotherapist in Ridgewood, New Jersey, and illustrated by Theodore Key.

Here are some sketches from the first in a series.

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Chris Warren-Dickins
Author & Psychotherapist

It is hard to believe that it is almost a year since I published Beyond Your Confines. Since then, I have received some great reviews, so thank you for those.
If you haven't yet left a review, please do add as many to the following forums -

• Amazon
• Goodreads
• Barnes & Noble
• Waterstones

If you haven't managed to get your hands on a copy, you can buy one today via any of these links. Beyond Your Confines is available as a paperback or ebook.

Chris Warren-Dickins
Author & Psychotherapist

Chris has published two non-fiction books:
Beyond Your Confines (published by Zero Labels in 2022), and
Beyond the Blue (published by Zero Labels in 2021).
Their debut novel is coming soon.
 
Chris is a psychotherapist (licensed professional counselor) in New Jersey. They started out life as an attorney in the UK (having graduated from University College London in 1998), and since then, Chris has been awarded a Masters in Counseling & Psychotherapy in 2010 (University of East London). That same year, Chris published research into male experiences of suicidal ideation and counseling interventions.

Aside from writing and psychotherapy, their true passion is being a parent to two elementary-aged children.
Chris finds that writing, parenting and psychotherapy complement each other, as we are all continuously in a state of growth and change.

Learn more

What an honor! The cover of my latest book Beyond Your Confines (cover designed by the talented Anabeth Bostrup) has been shortlisted for a Cover of the Month award.

You can vote here -

I am honored to have contributed to Selena Gomez’s new mental health platform, Wondermind.
Here is an article about loneliness, a common complaint in this post-pandemic world.

Read the full article here.
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Chris Warren-Dickins

 Since the pandemic, our mental health has deteriorated at a global level. Some studies estimate an increase in depression by 53 million extra cases and a staggering 76 million extra cases of anxiety. In the United States alone, research shows that 4 in 10 adults suffer from anxiety or depression, whereas before the pandemic it was just 1 in 10.

As a psychotherapist, this troubles me, but we don’t just get to blame the new kid on the block. Even before the pandemic, we saw a decline in our mental health due to the rapid growth in technology (including smartphones). Our need for certainty and the quick fix of an instant answer has taken us further from the wisdom and natural rhythms that we can find within. At a greater rate, we are recycling half-baked ideas that take us further and further from a felt sense of truth.

In my new book Beyond Your Confines, I argue that the coincidence of these two major trends (the pandemic and the growth in technology) has trapped us within an internal (mental) prison of our own creation. Evidence of this is all around, with greater emotion dysregulation and an uptick of unhelpful thought patterns (for example, the over-simplification of black and white thinking that polarizes views).

For survivors of trauma, life during (and since) the pandemic has been particularly challenging, creating an even greater swing on the dialectic of trauma that is a feeling of too much at one moment, and then feeling nothing (or shutdown) at the next moment. In Beyond Your Confines, I pay particular attention to the prevalence of trauma, and how we can learn how to regulate our emotions again. 

One of the hardest groups hit by the pandemic has been parents of school-aged (and younger) children. In recent studies, 27% of parents reported that their own mental health has deteriorated, and 14% reported worsening behavioral health for their children. For those parents who are also survivors of trauma, the growth in technology and the pandemic has created unique challenges. As a result, I dedicate a whole chapter to parenting through, and after, a pandemic.

It is my hope that Beyond Your Confines can help you to understand how you trap yourself within a mental prison, and if you can understand what confines you, this might help you to find the key to free your mind. We can learn a great deal from history, and so I examine other pandemics, and how we have responded to these. For example, in 1980 smallpox was eradicated because of the cooperation and collaboration between countries. In Beyond Your Confines, I explain that we need each other to free our minds and achieve a healthy state of mind. We can co-regulate each other, a concept introduced by Dr Stephen Porges when he explained Polyvagal Theory. As you will find out in Beyond Your Confines, Polyvagal Theory is an important component to mental health.

We can also learn from the 1918 and 2020 pandemics, which showed us that confinement helped to slow the spread of influenza (in 1918) and COVID-19 (in 2020). In Beyond Your Confines, I explain that confinement can sometimes help with your mental health, especially if you translate that to a period of rest or disengagement, whether that is from work, social media, or even the demands of your loved ones. In my new book, I examine the concept of burnout, something that has posed a greater risk since the pandemic and a growth in technology has blurred so many boundaries. Did we see a rebellion against this blurring of boundaries during the Great Resignation of 2021? Was this an example of people reaching beyond their confines, freeing their minds, and reaching for a more authentic way to live? Perhaps. I will leave that to you to decide once you have read the book.

The process of writing Beyond Your Confines has underscored my belief that to tackle any mental health issue, it is impossible to confine one’s focus to the individual. We are all interconnected, and so we are not just looking at an internal prison of distorted thought patterns or emotion dysregulation, we need to understand the societal distortions that confine us; distortions such as structural inequality, societal privilege, and discrimination. Mental health practitioners have a duty to examine these societal influences, and I hope that I have, at least in part, addressed this duty by publishing my new book.

Beyond Your Confines is available from all good book retailers from 1 October 2022.

Chris Warren-Dickins
Psychotherapist and Author
www.chriswarrendickins.com
 
Sources

The Lancet - https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02143-7/fulltext
Kaiser Family Foundation - https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/the-implications-of-covid-19-for-mental-health-and-substance-use/
“Brain Health Consequences of Digital Technology Use,” Gary W. Small, Jooyeon Lee, Aaron Kaufman, Jason Jalil, Prabha Siddarth, et al https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7366948/
The Polyvagal Theory, Stephen W. Porges
Well-being of parents and children during the pandemic - https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/146/4/e2020016824/79686/Well-being-of-Parents-and-Children-During-the?autologincheck=redirected?nfToken=00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000