What Mental Illness Really Is… (and what it isn’t)

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Summary

'A must-read... Fascinating' JO BRAND

We need to rethink the conversation around mental health - psychologist Lucy Foulkes explores how and why.

How do mental health problems arise?
How do we distinguish between the 'normal' challenges of modern life and actual illness?
Is society really experiencing a new mental health crisis?

In this urgently needed book, psychologist Lucy Foulkes investigates what we know about mental illness - and shines a light on what we don't. It offers a profound new approach to how we think, talk and help when it comes to mental health.

(Previously published in 2021 in hardback under the title Losing Our Minds.)

'Captivating...engaging and lucid' Sarah-Jayne Blakemore

'Clear-headed, compassionate and, ultimately, optimistic' Mark Haddon

'Thorough, wise...much needed' Mark Rice-Oxley

Reviews

This wonderful book offers an amazingly readable and cutting-edge scientific account of mental illness
Matthew Broome, Professor of Psychiatry and Youth Mental Health, Matthew Broome, Professor of Psychiatry and Youth Mental Health

About the author

Lucy Foulkes

Dr Lucy Foulkes is a psychologist who researches mental health and social development in adolescence. She is currently a senior research fellow at the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families, an honorary lecturer in psychology at UCL and a research fellow at Oxford University. She is the author of What Mental Illness Really Is (and What It Isn't) and has written for the Guardian, New Scientist and numerous other publications and has been interviewed in The Times, VICE and on the BBC Radio 4's All in the Mind and Start the Week.

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