Kent Winward’s Reviews > This Book Will Change Your Mind About Mental Health: A Journey into the Heartland of Psychiatry > Status Update

"That we need to negotiate and survive the social world is just a fact, " Joe Gold argues. 'And it's none to easy, right? It's quite a challenge. It pays to be vigilant to potential threats.' The key word here is potential. There's no point being vigilant to a threat that's already materialised and done its damage. no, we need to anticipate danger in order to avoid it.

[A] basic premise of psychiatry is to think about thoughts. When we listen closely to what our patients are saying, paying attention to psychotic and non-psychotic thought with equal consideration, we foster the therapeutic alliance, and stronger alliances yield better therapeutic outcomes. The fact that delusions mean something to our patients is reason enough for them to mean something to us.

We humans are not, on the whole, especially rational creatures. Our minds are filled with prejudices, superstitions, misremembered details, lies we've told ourselves and opinions-held-as-fact. An once we do believe something we tend to hold on to it tightly, regardless of its veracity.

But what to do about mental health stigma? Well, Dr Lucy Johnstone has a pretty radical suggestion: 'The quickest and easiest way of getting rid of stigma is to get rid of psychiatric disgnoses.'

In fact, the 'It's an illness like any other and you wouldn't tell me to pull myself together if I had cancer/a broken leg/diabetes message (which forms the bedrock of almost all mental health anti-stigma campaigns) may actually increase prejudice against people.

'Popular knowledge about mental illness', writes Graham Thornicroft, 'is a potent cocktail of profound ignorance and pernicious misinformation.'

"I suspect that one reason we find neuroscientific explanations so appealing is because however fiendishly complicated the actual science might be, it still seems to simplify everything:no need to worry about 'mental illness' because the really clever people are all over it. Except they're not. Not yet anyway. Srtonngly evidenced biological markers . . . as anticipated by scientists for decades,remain-at best-distant