Skip to main content

This Book Will Change Your Mind About Mental Health: A Journey Into the Heartland of Psychiatry by Nathan Filer

'What needs fixing, may not reside within you at all.'


Nathan Filer's book, "This Book Will Change Your Mind About Mental Health," provides a poignant and sobering account of the systemic brutality of the mental health system, contrasted by the kindness and sincere efforts of individuals working within it. The book is a collection of stories from survivors of the mental health system, shedding light on the perplexing paradox of how the sincere efforts of individuals working within a system can culminate into a system that obliterates personal autonomy.

While the book does an excellent job of explaining the how, it neglects to explore the why. Why does the mental health system fail so many people? Why is knowledge about mental illness so misinformed and ignorant? These are critical questions that need to be addressed to truly understand the depth of the problem.

Graham Thornicroft, a professor of community psychiatry at King's College London, asserts that popular knowledge about mental illness is a potent cocktail of profound ignorance and pernicious misinformation. This is a fundamental issue that needs to be addressed, as it perpetuates the stigma and shame surrounding mental ill health.

Nathan explains that what is agreed in mental health is that nothing is agreed. From the terms, to the diagnosis to the treatments, nothing is agreed. We are in a prescientific era in understanding ourselves. For all our technology advances, we barely understand ourselves and people who seek help are at the mercy of this confusion. 

The reality of the pain caused by mental illness is cold and brutal, and the inadequacy of the words used to describe it is . Filer's book provides a much-needed perspective on the mental health system and highlights the urgent need for change. The stories of survivors are a powerful reminder that the system is failing those who need it most and that there is a pressing need for a more compassionate, nuanced, and effective approach to mental health care.

Nathan Filer's book, "This Book Will Change Your Mind About Mental Health," provides a sobering account of the systemic brutality of the mental health system and the urgent need for evidence based change.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism  Shoshana Zuboff I pored over this book, stayed with the words. Read and reread them. Drank deeply from their wisdom.  It was not an easy read, but ultimately it gave far more than it took. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is a seminal text for our age.  Zuboff's account of surveillance capitalism is elegant, poised and persuasive. Yet for all her brilliance, Shonanna’s central thesis suffers a number of fundamental flaws.   Where the Age is at it’s strongest is in the articulation of surveillance capitalism.  Consider this, ‘Who owns your face?’, ‘Who owns your behaviour?’  What you do, where you go, who you know, all this has value and extracting value from these data is the business model of the surveillance capitalist.  But this is only the description, where Zuboff’s account takes a darker turn, is in the control. Once Surveillance Capitalists have provided a d...
Post a Comment
Read more

Americanah a novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Americanah is a hymn to the complexity of our emotional lives. It is a novel where many things are said, but these are the things that I heard; 1) there is comfort in cheap chocolate. 2) she shows us how arbitrary brutality pervades our world and some of this is not intentional cruelty; it's just the systemic faceless kind. 3) Harm is a temporal thing, it can happen in an instant and we'll live with it for the rest of our lives. This is obvious in a car crash, but here it is of the emotional kind. Growing into a malignant burden that corrupts the rest of our relationships, and each of us kills the things we love. 4) It's a book about place and identity that rails against those narrow confines of identity. Her characters resist all attempts to be defined or sully themselves in narrow trenches of how to be. 'Ring out false pride in place and blood' 6) Adichie is a woman, who knows her place and that place is among the classics. She has a character joke about the...
Post a Comment
Read more

King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild

When I started this book, George Floyd was alive.  His name was known only to his loved ones, friends and community.  Now his daughter is without her Daddy, and we know his name.   Imagine a mountain of corpses, George's body is flung somewhere near the top of this pile.  I say near the top since bodies have been added since his murder.  Hochschild's points to the nameless dead, beneath poor George's black body.   Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost needs to be widely read. While it deals with the particular horrors of King Leopold’s reign of terror in the Congo, it makes clear that the butchery characteristic of King Leopold’s reign were features of all European colonies. I first moved from Ireland to England in 1995.  Quickly making English friends, one of the striking observations was how these otherwise well informed and articulate individuals knew next to nothing about Ireland, it’s history and how that history informed it’s current p...
Post a Comment
Read more