English Title: To Thrive
Chinese Title: 向阳而生
Author: Min Deng, PhD
Published: 2025
Pages: 70 pp.
Introduction
In To Thrive, Dr. Min Deng offers a personal and hopeful odyssey through the darkness of depression, suicidal ideation, and childhood trauma into healing, love, and perseverance. Drawing on her own experience as a developmental psychologist, Christian, and survivor, Dr. Deng brings living tales of real people who've endured unconscionable suffering and of the inner fortitude that allows them to heal through the power of their unbreakable spirit.
With humility and compassion, To Thrive breaks the silence on mental illness, showing the redemption possible despite the struggle. Dr. Deng combines her own hard-won insight with that of others to show how in the bleakest corners of existence, hope can be regained and trust restored.
This book is both a witness to recovery and a summons to see others' hidden suffering, to respond with empathy, and to walk beside the people who need us most. And a reminder that, regardless of where we come from or what obstacles have been thrown in our way, we aren't alone.
About the Author
Born and raised in China, Dr. Min Deng earned a Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2008. She was baptized and became a Christian in 2009.
As a developmental psychologist, she is interested in parenting, child development, parent-child relationship, marital relationship, domestic abuse, suicide prevention, sexuality, and gender identities, etc. From 2020 to 2021, she completed six biblical counseling courses at Christian Counseling & Education Foundation, including Marriage Counseling, Counseling Abusive Marriages, Helping Relationships, Counseling & Physiology, Dynamics of Biblical Counseling, and Counseling Problems & Procedures.
Her first book of her series on mental health, Stay Alive, was published in 2023. As a follow-up on Stay Alive, she completed her second book To Thrive in 2025, which she shares freely online. Both books focus on suicide and its risks. She is currently writing her third book To Live, an autobiographical book on suicide prevention, a sequel to Stay Alive and To Thrive. Simultaneously, she is in the early stages of preparations for writing her fourth book on domestic abuse. Additionally, she intends to write more on parenting, church hurt, sexuality, and gender identities, etc.
She is the Communications Director at LifeSpring Church in Durham, NC. She also provides free private biblical counseling at her church. She lives with her loving husband of 20 years whom she met in 1997 and married in 2005, and their beloved dog Coco in the Carolinas. In her spare time, she loves watching the sunrise on the beach, hiking, working out, traveling, reading, and fashion. She can be reached via email at min.deng@gmail.com
