Thriving With bipolar: A Personal and Practical Guide to Living Well

Living with bipolar can feel like your own mind is working against you.

For years, TV presenter and mental health advocate Leah Charles-King searched for answers that went beyond clinical explanations and vague advice. What she needed was something practical, honest and human — a way to understand what was happening and learn how to build a life that felt stable and meaningful again.

‘Thriving with bipolar: A Personal and Practical Guide to Living Well’ is the book she wished she had been given when she was first diagnosed.

This isn’t a memoir or a clinical study. It’s a straight-talking guide for anyone who wants tools that actually hold up in real life.

Chapter by chapter, Leah offers something more valuable than inspiration: a compassionate framework. You’ll learn how to spot the traps that pull you under, strengthen the habits that hold you up, and rebuild trust with yourself when your confidence has been shaken.

Because living with bipolar isn’t something you “fix” once. It’s something you protect — in the way you sleep, the way you think, the way you spend, the way you love, the way you recover, and the choices you make when your mind is not playing fair.

No fluff. No false positivity. Just the clarity and hope Leah wished she’d been given when she was first diagnosed — written like a conversation with someone who genuinely gets it and cares.

This isn’t just about surviving bipolar.

It’s about thriving with bipolar.

Foreword written by Heston & Melanie Blumenthal

Leah Charles-King is a TV presenter, speaker and mental health advocate with almost four decades in the entertainment industry.With over 25 years on screen, she has built a career spanning live broadcasting, children's TV, entertainment formats and international media. From her early beginnings as a music artist in the 90s girl group Kléshay to becoming a familiar face on British television, Leah is now best known as a presenter on Channel 4's A Place in the Sun.Alongside her multi award-winning media career, Leah has become a powerful and trusted voice in mental health.After being diagnosed with bipolar in 2012, she spent years navigating the condition in secret before choosing to speak openly about her experience in 2019. Since then, she has built a platform that challenges stigma, raises awareness and discusses suicide prevention. As an ambassador for Bipolar UK, she regularly hosts major awareness events, including World Bipolar Day, reaching audiences both in the UK and internationally.Her debut book, Thriving with bipolar: A Personal and Practical Guide to Living Well, is rooted in lived experience. It was written to offer what she was never given at diagnosis - hope, alongside practical, grounded guidance to help people build stability, learn to live well, and move beyond surviving to thriving. This is the ultimate guide for bipolar management.Leah's work sits at the intersection of storytelling, advocacy and impact. Whether presenting on screen, speaking on stage or connecting through her writing, she is known for her honesty, warmth, wit, and her ability to reach people in a way that feels real, direct and genuinely relatable.