Practicing Mental Illness is a guide to using meditation, movement and meaningful work to help manage affective disorders such as depression, bipolar disorder and anxiety. Not a typical book on mindfulness, it acknowledges where mindfulness practices as taught today can be helpful, and where methods and teachings in popular mindfulness can be very damaging to people with mental illness. George Hofmann has written a subversive self-help book, which acknowledges that our society's low expectations of people with behavioral challenges contribute to the development of mental illness. He gives the reader the necessary tools to take responsibility to get well and stay well. In the end, Practicing Mental Illness presents a method that can help people with affective disorders predict oncoming mood changes and intervene to head off damaging emotions and maintain a balance of positive mental, and physical, health.

After a series of hospitalizations, George Hofmann managed to overcome the worst of bipolar disorder by adding practices in focused attention to the usual therapies of medicine and talk. He is the author of Resilience: Handling Anxiety in a Time of Crisis, and maintains the site 'Practicing Mental Illness', which promotes meditation, movement and meaningful work as keys to growth and healing. He lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.