Bella Jackson

I loved this book. Its power is giving a real insight into a world that many of us are unfamiliar with but that we need to understand. Mental health is something that affects us all, and Fragile Minds makes you realise how we just haven’t funded it correctly, and how important it is for everyone to have a proper and functioning mental health service. We spend so much time speaking about wellbeing, but this book shows how far we have to come in making sure that when we stumble, there is something solid there to catch us.

A painful revelation of harsh truths and a call to do better.

Fragile Minds is beautiful and restrained, sensitive and powerful. Bella Jackson tells incredible human stories with wisdom and insight. This is a very compassionate book. One that opens up a righteous anger at a system that's failing.

Professor Simukai Chigudu author of Chasing Freedom

A brave attempt to confront the abuses of psychiatric treatment...an important book.

Fragile minds is a book of powerful significance. It’s beautiful and compelling, urgent and compassionate, often distressing but ultimately hopeful. By giving voice to the users of our mental health service the author calls our attention to our largest unmet health need. She opens up our minds to a key question: how would we feel if we were in need of this care?

Prof Jim Lucey MD, Inspector of Mental Health Services, Mental Health Commission IE

A masterpiece. Pulls the curtain back on how mental health is treated now.

Cat Sims, author of The Mental Load Diaries

A shocking, intimate portrayal of psychiatric nurse training in the UK. This book will rock your complacency towards how we understand and treat mental health, and of what we know about personal suffering. It will break your heart, and perhaps in that cracking open you will rally with its author to work for change. In vivid and sensitive prose, Bella Jackson paints a compassionate yet disturbing portrait of a system more ill than those it claims to help. A must read for anyone concerned about our whole society’s wellbeing.

What makes this memoir so powerful is the precision of Jackson’s observation. She offers a close, empathetic gaze that honours the complexity of every life she encounters. By centering the voices of both patients and staff, she resists easy narratives of heroism or failure, showing instead a system that too often consumes those within it. Her prose is measured and vivid, balancing urgency with care, and ensuring that the people she writes about are remembered as individuals rather than statistics. 
At its heart, Fragile Minds is both a testimony and a call to action. It demands that we confront the uncomfortable truths we prefer to overlook, while reminding us of the courage and humanity still present in broken systems.

Reveals shocking truths…an important memoir. Jackson writes about her experiences with compassion for both the patients and staff unwittingly caught up in the erratic and overstretched services.

Stories from an NHS mental health ward

There is a narrative we’ve become comfortable with: Mental health services are underfunded and understaffed. But that is only half the story. The other half is messy and confronting; uncomfortable enough to make us look sharply away. 
 
It is the story of the staff who believed they could make a difference, but were worn down by morally ambiguous tasks, impossible workloads and a systemic resistance to change. It is the story of the patients who are failed by hastily made diagnoses, overreliance on medication, coercion, stigma and inconsistency of care, and of the inspiring individuals struggling for justice and revolution. 
 
Beautifully wrought and staggeringly urgent , Fragile Minds documents Bella Jackson's time as a trainee mental health nurse, and the devastation and hope she encountered in winding corridors and behind locked doors. With compassion and care Bella introduces us to a vivid cast of staff and patients, prompting us to look closer, ask questions and demand more for them.

Bella Jackson

Praise for Fragile Minds

I loved this book. Its power is giving a real insight into a world that many of us are unfamiliar with but that we need to understand. Mental health is something that affects us all, and Fragile Minds < ...

A painful revelation of harsh truths and a call to do better.

Absolutely fascinating.

I loved this book. Its power is giving a real insight into a world that many of us are unfamiliar with but that we need to understand. Mental health is something that affects us all, and Fragile Minds < ...

A painful revelation of harsh truths and a call to do better.

Absolutely fascinating.

I loved this book. Its power is giving a real insight into a world that many of us are unfamiliar with but that we need to understand. Mental health is something that affects us all, and Fragile Minds < ...

A painful revelation of harsh truths and a call to do better.

Absolutely fascinating.

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