[6] She has received two Australia Council for the Arts grants for non-fictions books, and been the recipient of several residencies at Varuna, The Writers' House, Katoomba NSW.

Marina Warner, reviewing Poison in The New York Times,[9] writes: “Her book…measures out, in small loving spoonfuls, grains of information about [a] family story … Between the quiet drip feed of her personal memoir, Bell mixes in stronger flavors: ingredients from criminology and psychology, botany and chemistry.” Author Gillian Bouras writes: “Bell shows how poison has exerted a peculiar and specific fascination in the past.

[10]” British author, the late Terry Pratchett wrote: “I am a compulsive book lender and keep a stock of Gail Bell's The Poison Principle.

The book questions the place of guns in our social world, and explores the intricate, surprising ways our minds deal with traumatic shock.

Australian academic, Dr Gwyn Symonds, describes Bell’s text as “shaped by memory from her own precipitating violent injury” such that it “bristles with an authentic awareness of its trauma”.

[13] Critic and reviewer, Neil Jillett, writes that “Bell’s prose has an exquisite precision” and notes the book’s value in helping “those of us who have not had an abnormally traumatic experience to imagine the complex and permanent damage it can cause”[14] In The Worried Well: The Depression Epidemic and the Medicalisation of our Sorrows Bell wonders why well over a million Australians now take antidepressant drugs.

Political commentator and Crikey correspondent at large, Guy Rundle, wrote a spirited response to The Worried Well describing Bell’s essay as “a fantastic demolition job – and all the more powerful for the manner in which it combines front-line experience with reflection and scholarship.