This Book Will Change Your Mind About Mental Health

Having read it

★★★★★

Brilliant for its insight and the stories it reports of people and the difficulties they have faced and are facing, with themselves but mostly, in my reading of the book, the systems that work around them and try to help.

As written, the foundations of caring and helping others with their ‘mental illness’ comes from a good place but, so often, gets subsumed my other priorities and forms of progress that don’t seem to actually help patients over the long-term.

It was telling to learn of the fact that many medications purported to help people, which they can, in some cases, are actually contributing to the problems they are so say trying to solve.

It seems like society (and its economy and ways of operating to show productivity and efficacy) still wants to reduce everything to a product and/or simple, stepped approach to sorting things out. But only sorting things out in a way that then just probably means you need to buy and use a certain product or service to do things ‘correctly’ to get better and ‘succeed’.

As explained and implied throughout the book, life and its experiences are a spectrum, a moving cloud of happenings and they need to be seen as such. They are malleable and changeable because of many outside circumstances and environmental factors and, even politics and economics. ‘Mental illness’ needs to be treated more like that, not reduced to a ‘simple’ tablet-led solution for efficacy and convenient labelling. Then, surely, greater appreciation and understanding, throughout society, of the difficulties mental illness can present can be managed and treated much more effectively, by all, not exclusively ‘specialists’.

Life and all its interconnectedness and difficulties is well worth exploring and appreciating as this book gets across through its often under-appreciated and misunderstood world.

However, despite the book’s humanity about its subjects, some of the footnotes are quite entertaining, helping to lighten the reading load, especially with a nod at one point to an Ant and Dec record, Psyche! The other footnotes are informative and salient so make sure you read them.