Losing Our Minds: The Challenge of Defining Mental Illness

A compelling and incisive book that questions the overuse of mental health terms to describe universal human emotions.

Over ten years ago, when Dr. Lucy Foulkes was diagnosed with depression as a first year undergraduate, few people talked about mental illness. But by 2019, there's a World Mental Health Day, expansive training in mental health awareness, and figures like Michelle Obama and the Princes William and Harry encouraging us to seek help. There's no longer a silence around the subject; and while this is a hugely positive development, public understanding has become distorted. Growing awareness of conditions like OCD and depression, doesn't include symptoms. Psychiatric terminology like anxiety or depression is used when we mean stress or sadness, fanning widespread belief in this--largely fictional--new epidemic. And worse, we have little idea how to support people who are suffering with mental illness; talking is a good first step, but it's only the first.

In her first book, Dr. Foulkes will look at how we've started to get mental illness so wrong. She'll examine the state of our knowledge about the true causes of mental illness, how and when it develops, and look at current treatments and recovery, outlining everything we know so far--and what we don't. Drawing on Foulkes's own research as well as interviews with other leading mental health scientists, Losing Our Minds sets the record straight about one of the most controversial, misunderstood and politicized contemporary subjects.