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Two Roads has acquired The Anxiety Survival Guide: How to survive the end of the world (when it’s in your own head) by comedy writer Aaron Gillies.
Senior editor Kate Hewson pre-empted world rights from Becky Thomas at Johnson & Alcock.
Gillies, who most recently coined the popular Donald Trump nickname "Wotsit Hitler" as @TechnicallyRon on twitter, has written for and been featured in a range of publications, including Buzzfeed, the Guardian, the Telegraph and the Huffington Post.
While there are many books on surviving a zombie apocolaypse or nuclear war, Gillies wanted to write book about how it is to feel like the world is ending every single time you wake up. This, he explains, is what having anxiety is like, and his book The Anxiety Survival Guide aims to help readers by exploring the "tools to fight back", whether medication, therapy, CBT, coping techniques - "or simply a dark sense of humour".
Hewson said: "I have loved Aaron’s tweets on his battles with his brain for ages, and they always resonate far and wide. I think this is a much-wanted and needed book – something which captures the ridiculousness as well as the struggle of anxiety, and which, all comedy aside, will genuinely help people."
Gillies book continues the trend seeing an increase in publishing on mental health issues that publishers last year said reflected cultural change. But Gillies said there was still "a long way to go" until mental health was taken seriously enough.
He said: "Whilst the conversation about normalising mental health issues has begun, there is a long way to go, and anxiety can be brushed off as a lesser cause. My writing background is comedy, and I want to bring this to conversations around mental health, and to discuss anxiety in a healthy, informative and humorous way."
The book will be published on 19th April 2018.