Stories, Guides & Learning Made to Be Held

What happens when someone finally finds the courage to say, “Pastor, I'm not okay”?

Not every struggle can be answered with another prayer, another Scripture or an instruction to have more faith.

Pastor, I'm Not Okay is a practical, compassionate guide for church leaders and the people who turn to them for support.

Written by Shelly-Ann Shaw, founder of The Depression Chronicles, this book explores the conversations churches cannot afford to avoid, including depression, anxiety, grief, trauma, suicidal thoughts, abuse, spiritual struggles and the mental-health needs of children and teenagers.

For pastors, elders and ministry leaders, it offers guidance on listening, recognising warning signs, responding safely, protecting confidentiality and connecting people with appropriate professional support.

For individuals who are struggling, it offers reassurance, practical language for difficult conversations and ways to seek help without feeling that their faith is being put on trial.

Featuring relatable church scenarios, practical exercises, conversation examples, biblical reflections and useful response tools, this is a resource designed to be read, revisited and put into practice.

Because when someone says, “I'm not okay,” what happens next matters.

Inside this book

27 chapters across two parts, with church scenarios, reflection activities, response guidance, safeguarding considerations and referral tools.

Depression does not only happen in therapy rooms or at moments of crisis. It happens while the laundry waits, messages go unanswered, plans get cancelled and somebody asks how you are doing when you do not know how to answer.

365 Days With Depression was created for those ordinary days.

Across 52 weekly themes, the book offers a full year of readings about living with depression as it is actually experienced. Some days offer perspective. Some offer a practical tool. Some simply put language around something the reader may have been feeling but unable to explain.

Weekly reflections create space to notice what is happening without demanding constant progress or positivity. Selected audio elements add another way to engage when reading feels like too much.

This is not a promise that every day gets better. It is company, language and something useful to reach for while you are still living through it.

Inside this book

Daily readings across 52 weekly themes, weekly reflection, practical coping tools and selected audio elements.

Depression may have a clinical name, but the way people understand it, talk about it, hide it and live with it is shaped partly by culture.

365 Days Wid Depression brings the year-long concept of 365 Days With Depression into a Jamaican and Caribbean context.

Across 52 weekly themes, the book makes room for the realities surrounding depression as well as depression itself. The things people say. The things families may not know how to say. The expectation to keep going. Faith. Humour. Silence. Strength. Survival. And those days when “mi deh yah” is about as much explanation as a person can manage.

The language moves naturally between English and Jamaican speech rather than performing either one. Daily readings are accompanied by reflection and practical tools, with selected audio elements providing another way to engage.

It is culturally familiar without pretending there is one Jamaican experience of depression.

Inside this book

Daily readings, 52 weekly themes, weekly reflection, practical coping tools, culturally grounded discussion and selected audio elements.

Related edition

Readers looking for the main international edition can choose 365 Days With Depression.

There are versions of ourselves we grow beyond.

And there are versions we do not exactly leave behind, even when it feels as though we did.

To the Girl I Left Behind turns toward the younger self with the perspective adulthood makes possible. It considers childhood, survival, belonging, silence, hurt, adaptation and the ways a girl learns to keep moving when life asks more of her than it should.

This is not an attempt to rewrite childhood into a neat story where everything happened for a reason. It is an act of looking back honestly at the girl who lived it, including what she needed, what she learned and what she carried forward.

The work sits between memory and reflection, asking what it means to recognise the younger person still present inside the adult life that came afterward.

Some experiences change us loudly. Others become part of us so gradually that we only recognise them when we look back.

Love, Loss & Becoming is a poetry collection about those changes.

Moving through love, absence, childhood, memory, grief, longing, survival and the complicated work of becoming, the poems speak from different points along one life rather than from the safety of a perfectly resolved ending.

The collection moves between English and Jamaican language because both belong to the voice telling the story. Neither is decoration, translation for effect or proof of where the writer comes from.

At its centre is a conversation between who we were, what happened to us and who we are still becoming.

Not every loss becomes a lesson.

Not every earlier self disappears.

Some remain with us.