Book excerpt: The Wellness Diaries takes readers on a unique roller coaster journey through the eyes of a paranoid college student while battling mental illness, to the darkness of planning suicide, to a remarkable recovery. It offers an account of the authors experience of mental illness-early symptoms, diagnosis, battle with medications, and a plan to end the pain. The book takes an about turn as the journey is observed and tracked, from despair and suffering, to inspiration, adventure, contagious enthusiasm, and rebuilding a life, one step at a time, through reclaiming health. It includes persuasive arguments as to why health is a choice, and it offers a unique approach to health and wellness from the standpoint of lifestyle, including essential fundamentals such as a plant-based diet, quality sleep and outside activity. It discusses some aspects of health which are sometimes overlooked. I feel mountain ranges above my dark times. Those days are in the past, and so distant from me now, that looking back upon them seems as if I have woken up from a really bad nightmare... Readers will be touched with tears and laughter, and may wonder when Owen catches a break. Experience his in-depth sincerity in accounting the exact events which shaped this mans recovery from mental illness into a new life filled with gratitude and genuine love for life, the Earth, and all living things, and with a new outlook as a botanist and a naturalist. The Wellness Diaries is a book which offers a contagiously inspiring outlook on health, available as a choice.