Blog Archives
Combating the Stigma
A Trial Lawyer’s Journey from Psych Ward to Wellness chronicles your journey through mental illness and recovery, revealing how resilience, humor, meaningful relationships, and everyday wellness practices can transform adversity into purpose and hope. What motivated you to write this book?
Combating the stigma that folks with mental health disorders, like I have, have to fight against. I want to encourage everyone who needs help to be willing and able to ask for it.
How did your experience with psychiatric hospitalization change your understanding of mental illness, both personally and as an attorney advocating for vulnerable individuals?
It made me aware that in the US we fail to reach many people who need support and mental health support. There are too many barriers to receiving help such as the high cost and limited availability.
As a criminal defense attorney, how did witnessing injustice and representing vulnerable clients affect your mental health and understanding of secondary trauma?
Yes, visiting client on death, having client’s beaten by police and then falsely charged, and having a teenage client commit suicide all were traumas that affected me during my 43 year long career.
Annie Oakley brings humor and companionship to your story. What has your relationship with her taught you about emotional resilience and everyday wellness?
Having a beloved pet is essential to my mental health and well being. Psychiatrists and therapists should write prescriptions for companion animals. Annie is a rescue dog who rescued me.
Author Links: X | Facebook | Website
Concise, intimate, and encouraging, the book offers an accessible portrait of recovery rooted in companionship, purposeful activity, and care.
A Trial Lawyer’s Journey from Psych Ward to Wellness
In A Lawyer’s Journey from Psych Ward to Wellness, attorney and author Alex Charns offers a candid and personal account of mental illness, recovery, and the everyday practices that make a meaningful life possible. Drawing on his experiences as a criminal defense lawyer, a husband, a father, and a survivor of a serious psychiatric crisis, Charns examines mental health with refreshing openness and an irreverent sense of humor. His German shepherd and husky mix, Annie Oakley, serves as an affectionate and occasionally demanding companion throughout the narrative, bringing warmth and levity to difficult subjects. Through short, accessible chapters, Charns explores the importance of professional treatment, physical activity, meaningful relationships, spiritual life, and personal purpose. The result is an engaging combination of memoir, practical wellness reflections, and advocacy for greater understanding of mental health disorders. His willingness to discuss his psychiatric hospitalization and ongoing treatment gives the book an authenticity that makes its message especially compelling.
One of the book’s most affecting elements is Charns’s exploration of how family history and professional experiences influence emotional well-being. He reflects on his mother’s traumatic childhood in Nazi-occupied Poland, the lingering effects of those experiences on his family, and his own struggles with anxiety and depression. These recollections provide valuable context for understanding the complexities of mental health across generations. His career as a criminal defense attorney adds another important dimension. Charns describes the psychological demands of representing vulnerable clients, confronting institutional injustice, and witnessing the consequences of failures within the legal system. His observations about secondary trauma among attorneys are particularly insightful, demonstrating how professional responsibilities can leave lasting emotional impressions. Throughout these discussions, Charns maintains a clear commitment to confronting stigma. His declaration, “I am not ashamed,” expresses one of the book’s central convictions: people experiencing psychiatric disorders deserve the same compassion, dignity, and support afforded to those with physical illnesses.
Charns’s conversational writing style is among the book’s greatest strengths. He moves comfortably between serious reflection, professional anecdotes, family memories, and humorous observations about Annie’s considerable influence over his daily schedule. His affection for hockey, literature, music, and community involvement gives the memoir a lively personality, while photographs throughout the book offer additional glimpses into his personal world. The chapters are generally brief, creating a relaxed reading experience and allowing individual subjects to receive focused attention. Particularly appealing is the practical nature of his approach to wellness. Walking the dog, attending therapy, taking prescribed medication, connecting with friends, volunteering, practicing gratitude, and maintaining spiritual traditions all become meaningful parts of a larger picture. Charns recognizes that recovery involves multiple forms of support and that personal routines can contribute significantly to emotional stability. His humor makes these reflections approachable, while his experiences give them substance.
A Lawyer’s Journey from Psych Ward to Wellness is a thoughtful and frequently entertaining examination of resilience, self-awareness, and the importance of connection. Charns brings a distinctive perspective to mental health advocacy through his combination of legal experience, personal vulnerability, and enduring commitment to social justice. His reflections suggest that wellness encompasses much more than medical treatment alone. It also involves having relationships to nurture, activities to enjoy, convictions to uphold, and reasons to remain engaged with the world. The statement “We are not defined by our diagnosis” captures the compassionate philosophy running throughout the book. Charns presents mental health as an essential part of the broader human experience, deserving serious attention and open discussion. Readers interested in personal accounts of recovery, the emotional challenges of the legal profession, or the relationship between mental health and everyday living will find much to appreciate in this sincere, personable, and encouraging memoir.
Pages: 106 | ASIN: B0H71PX6VZ
Eliminate the Stigma
In Pizza Dog Annie’s Guide to Wellness, you blend memoir, humor, and practical guidance through Annie’s lively perspective, using the bond between you and your beloved dog to explore hope, healing, and resilience following your struggle with major depression. What inspired you to share your story?
I wanted to make the point that mental and physical illnesses should both be treated with compassion. It was my effort to eliminate the stigma by outing myself to change the way those with a mental illness are viewed.
Why was humor important to you when addressing such difficult subjects?
I believed that alternating dark subjects with humor would make it a more enjoyable read. My goal was a hopeful and joyful book despite the heavy subject.
What does your relationship with Annie reveal about the healing power of companionship?
Friendship with our pets and with our friends is essential to healthful living. Doctors should prescribe dogs and companion animals to the depressed and lonely.
After sharing this deeply personal journey, what does healing and resilience mean to you now?
I don’t feel ashamed anymore. My depression doesn’t define me. I don’t have to hide in the shadows. My recovery is complete, one day at a time.
Author Links: X | Facebook | Website
Across twenty-six compact chapters, Charns presents wellness as a collection of mutually reinforcing habits. Walking, medication, talk therapy, meditation, sleep, faith, friendship, reading, volunteer work, political participation, and gratitude all contribute to a balanced life. The book’s structure reflects this philosophy, moving briskly among personal memories, observations, photographs, and Annie’s comic complaints. Her demands for walks, games of fetch, and generous portions of dog treats give the narrative an appealing rhythm and keep its advice grounded in daily experience.
The book gains depth from Charns’s account of intergenerational trauma. His mother’s childhood in Nazi-occupied Poland, her later struggles with post-traumatic stress, and his own early encounters with Holocaust history illuminate the fears that shaped his family. Charns writes with particular honesty about psychosis, suicidal thoughts, sleep deprivation, and the stigma surrounding psychiatric hospitalization. The chapters on treatment and family support are direct and humane, presenting recovery as sustained work supported by professional care, meaningful routines, and personal relationships.
Annie’s humor gives the book its distinctive personality, but its strongest quality is the sincerity beneath the jokes. Charns’s affection for his dog becomes a way of expressing gratitude for the people, practices, and communities that helped restore his health. When Annie defines canine devotion by saying, “That is the power of the dog. Love. Love. And more love,” the line also summarizes the book’s central conviction. Concise, intimate, and encouraging, Pizza Dog Annie’s Guide to Wellness offers an accessible portrait of recovery rooted in companionship, purposeful activity, and care.” Literary Titan Review.
Personal Baggage
Bones of Black Saints follows two civil rights attorneys defending a young Black activist accused of shooting a white police officer while confronting racial injustice, police solidarity, and competing versions of truth in Durham, North Carolina. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I represented a young man named Carlos Riley in Durham. Bones of Black Saints is a fictionalized take on his trial.
How did you develop Zenko’s mixture of anxiety, humor, faith, intelligence, and self-doubt?
I wanted a passionate, committed trial attorney who struggled with mental health issues.
Why was it important to portray accomplished attorneys who also struggle with mental health?
I’ve grappled with my own mental health demons. Realistically presenting these issues was a goal of mine in this and in the series of other books, such as The Girl Wore a Hockey Helmet. We trial attorneys bring our personal baggage into the courtroom as much as we try to keep it out. Substance abuse, alcoholism, and depression disproportionately affect lawyers. That’s the reality. One of my clients was sent to Death Row in N.C. because he had a drunk trial attorney. After almost thirty years, the Governor commuted his sentence to life without parole.
What responsibility do you think fiction has when engaging with painful historical events?
Fiction can help us learn and make sense of racial injustice and prosecutorial misconduct. As a writer, I feel a responsibility to confront injustices of the past. That is the first step in combating such inequities in the future.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Website | Amazon
Pizza Dog Annie’s Guide to Wellness
Pizza Dog Annie’s Guide to Wellness, by Alex Charns, is a warm, candid blend of memoir, humor, and practical guidance. Narrated by Annie, a German shepherd and husky mix, the book follows Charns’s recovery after hospitalization for major depression with psychotic features. Annie’s lively perspective makes difficult subjects approachable while establishing the bond between dog and owner as the book’s emotional center. Her declaration, “I rescued Alex and the whole family,” neatly captures the reversal on which the narrative is built.
Across twenty-six compact chapters, Charns presents wellness as a collection of mutually reinforcing habits. Walking, medication, talk therapy, meditation, sleep, faith, friendship, reading, volunteer work, political participation, and gratitude all contribute to a balanced life. The book’s structure reflects this philosophy, moving briskly among personal memories, observations, photographs, and Annie’s comic complaints. Her demands for walks, games of fetch, and generous portions of dog treats give the narrative an appealing rhythm and keep its advice grounded in daily experience.
The book gains depth from Charns’s account of intergenerational trauma. His mother’s childhood in Nazi-occupied Poland, her later struggles with post-traumatic stress, and his own early encounters with Holocaust history illuminate the fears that shaped his family. Charns writes with particular honesty about psychosis, suicidal thoughts, sleep deprivation, and the stigma surrounding psychiatric hospitalization. The chapters on treatment and family support are direct and humane, presenting recovery as sustained work supported by professional care, meaningful routines, and personal relationships.
Annie’s humor gives the book its distinctive personality, but its strongest quality is the sincerity beneath the jokes. Charns’s affection for his dog becomes a way of expressing gratitude for the people, practices, and communities that helped restore his health. When Annie defines canine devotion by saying, “That is the power of the dog. Love. Love. And more love,” the line also summarizes the book’s central conviction. Concise, intimate, and encouraging, Pizza Dog Annie’s Guide to Wellness offers an accessible portrait of recovery rooted in companionship, purposeful activity, and care.
Pages: 78 | ASIN : B0H699ML1N
Bones of Black Saints
Alex Charns’s Bones of Black Saints is a legal thriller and courtroom drama rooted in the politics, history, and racial tensions of Durham, North Carolina. The case centers on Marcos Salazar, a young Black Lives Matter activist accused of shooting a white police officer during a traffic stop. His defense rests with veteran civil rights attorneys Star Gwiazda and Zenko Luczek, who believe the officer shot himself and that the police department has closed ranks around him. From jury selection through closing arguments, the novel turns legal procedure into a contest over whose version of reality will survive.
Zenko’s first-person narration gives this crime novel its distinct personality. He’s anxious, funny, devoutly Catholic, obsessed with hockey, and deeply shaped by his Polish family’s experiences during World War II. His thoughts move freely among the trial, the Black Madonna of Czestochowa, the Greensboro Massacre, old wounds, and elaborate hockey metaphors. Those digressions make the story feel intimate and politically alert, though I did feel that their frequency can slow the courtroom suspense at times. They also reveal how history lives inside Zenko’s daily choices, especially his determination to recognize fascism and institutional abuse before they’re allowed to hide behind respectable appearances.
The courtroom scenes are the strongest part of this police corruption thriller. Charns, a civil rights attorney, writes with a practitioner’s command of motions, evidence, jury selection, witness preparation, and cross-examination. Star is especially memorable, confronting hostile witnesses and prosecutorial misconduct with theatrical nerve and sharp legal instincts. Her relationship with Zenko brings humor and affection to proceedings charged with danger. Their shared mental health histories add further depth, showing two capable advocates who rely on medication, routines, friendship, faith, and hockey to remain steady under extraordinary pressure.
As social justice fiction, Bones of Black Saints connects one contested traffic stop to racial profiling, white supremacy, economic inequality, police solidarity, and the limits of courtroom justice. Its humor keeps the political argument lively, while its detailed trial strategy makes the eventual verdict feel earned. The final development lands with particular force because it exposes acquittal as one moment in a much longer struggle. This is an impassioned legal thriller about lawyers fighting for a client while wrestling with their own histories, blind spots, fears, and stubborn faith in justice. I recommend Charns’s novel to readers who enjoy thought-provoking legal thrillers that explore racial injustice and the complex pursuit of justice.
Pages: 419 | ASIN : B08F75MNK2
Flawed Interviews
Queer Justice follows a defense lawyer whose young client’s explosive claim about a Supreme Court Justice draws him into a web of FBI surveillance, political coercion, and buried truths. What inspired the setup of your story?
The FBI memo I received after 13 years of FOIA litigation against the Bureau. It was buried in Director J. Edgar Hoover’s “Official and Confidential” files that he stored under lock and key in his personal office. In 1983, the FBI claimed in a letter to me that it had no files on the Supreme Court. After suing them, I unearthed tens of thousands of pages of files including the blackmail memo accusing Justice Abe Fortas of a homosexual encounter. Such an allegation, if disclosed, would destroy his career, true or not. The FBI protected Justice Fortas to gain leverage over him.
How did you decide where documented fact should end and informed imagination should begin?
The jumping-off point for the fiction was where my factual investigation ended.
What did characters such as Cake and Max allow you to explore about queer life that the official records could not capture?
The FBI files were written in Bureau speak based on an informant’s report. Nothing about their target’s humanity was included. Cake and Max allowed me to show professionals living their lives in secret because to do otherwise would subject them to prosecution and the loss of their professions.
Why was it important to extend the story into 2016 and 2021 through Mitch Jr.’s investigation?
I wanted to show how flawed interviews conducted decades after the fact might be. Also, I wanted to make the FBI own the blackmail of a sitting justice in a powerful way. A modern queer attorney picking up the investigation seemed a good way to uncover further secrets.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Website | Amazon
Queer Justice
Alex Charns’s Queer Justice is a historical legal novel built around a startling question buried in the FBI’s own files: did J. Edgar Hoover use an allegation about Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas’s sex life to gain leverage over one of the most powerful judges in America? Charns takes that documented history and turns it into a story about secrecy, fear, loyalty, ambition, and the enormous power institutions possess when prejudice itself becomes a weapon. Beginning in 1966, the novel moves among Fortas, Hoover, the FBI, the Supreme Court, and a young defense lawyer named Mitch “Puck” Pilsudski, whose teenage client George “Sweet” Smith claims he had a sexual relationship with Fortas. What follows is part courtroom story, part political thriller, and part excavation of a period when being labeled homosexual could destroy a career before anyone bothered asking whether an accusation was true.
The novel is at its most engaging when that large historical machinery collides with the lives of ordinary people. Puck is still figuring out how to practice law when he finds himself brushing against the White House, the Supreme Court, FBI surveillance, antiwar protests, and secrets nobody wants exposed. Around him, Charns creates a memorable circle that includes investigator and gay rights activist Cake, Fortas law clerk Max Lieberman, and Puck’s sharp-witted partner Adela. Through Cake and Max in particular, the political becomes personal. Gay men aren’t simply subjects in an FBI file here. They fall in love, build friendships, go dancing, practice law, challenge authority, and imagine lives that the culture around them insists they shouldn’t be allowed to have. Those scenes give the book warmth and humor while making the government’s obsession with policing sexuality feel even more invasive.
Charns also does something unusual with the shape of the story. After spending most of the novel inside the upheavals of the 1960s, he jumps forward to 2016 and then 2021, when Puck’s son, Mitch Jr., begins digging through the surviving record. The shift turns Queer Justice into a story about the pursuit of history as much as history itself. Testimony changes. Memories become suspect. FBI files appear, disappear, and contradict earlier accounts. Junior’s own experience as a gay man adds another layer to his investigation, connecting the fear surrounding sexuality in his father’s generation with a later generation that can live more openly while still carrying some of the old silences. By the time hidden records finally surface, the question has grown larger than what happened between two men in a hotel room. It’s about who gets to create the official version of events, how long institutions can conceal what they’ve done, and what it costs to keep asking for the truth.
That tension between documented fact and informed imagination is what gives Queer Justice its distinctive character. Charns has spent decades pursuing FBI records through Freedom of Information Act requests and litigation, and the novel draws openly on that work, even concluding with actual documents and an account of the author’s long struggle to obtain them. Yet the history never stays trapped in an archive. It becomes a human story about lawyers and lovers, frightened teenagers and compromised judges, friendship and conscience, and the strange ways truth can survive the people who tried to bury it. Queer Justice turns the secrets of the powerful into a deeply human story about the people who lived in their shadow, and the truth that refused to stay buried.
Pages: 195 | ASIN: B0GFD82TFS
