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A review by synnereads
This Book Will Change Your Mind About Mental Health: A journey into the heartland of psychiatry by Nathan Filer
adventurous
emotional
informative
sad
3.5
This Book Did NOT Change My Mind About Mental Health.
UK books, what's up with these clickbaity, tabloid, honestly meaningless titles? I'm fed up with them. This book is about schizophrenia and psychosis, but the title doesn't exactly tell you that. There's no poetry to the tilte either, in my opinion.
This is probably not the author's fault, but the title still made me annoyed with the book from the get-go👌
(Btw, I listened to the audiobook read by the author)
It didn't exactly ease my annoyance when the author started saying "so-called" before every psychiatric term, because of "controversy", like this: "so-called schizophrenia", "so-called mental illness", and so on.
Do you know what's more controversial than the term mental illness!? Putting "so-called" in front of the term every time you say it!!!!
Do you want me to constantly question everything at a word-for-word level while reading? Because that is quite frankly exhausting!
And I was not satisfied with his surface-level explanation for including the so-calleds. A little more of an in-depth analysis of this controversy would have been nice.
One last criticism: even though I think it's extremely important to be critical about psychiatric drugs, I am still a little worried that the way it's portrayed here, people will become all "medication is bad" after reading this, which is also unfortunate. Despite all their downsides, we should keep in mind that psychiatric drugs are life-saving for many people.
Now that I've told you about all my dislikes, let's move on to the positives😁
Fortunately, my annoyance eventually lessened, and I was able to get invested in the poignant stories that made up around half of the book.
I found the story about the young boy with hebephrenic schizophrenia to be really enlightening (and heartbreaking), since I've never quite understood this subcategory of schizophrenia. It shows how extremely varied (heterogenous) schizophrenia can be as an illness.I hope the mother of this boy is doing okay today❤️
Also, one of the other stories about a mother was quite unlike anything I've read about schizophrenia before. The fact that these children lived with their mother in that state of mind for such a long time, is almost unfathomable.
So, yeah, I guess it wasn't toooo bad🙃 A mixed bag, I'd say.
I dedicate all my stars to the people that shared stories from their lives in this book.
A little recommendation:
I prefer the book "You Don't Have to be Mad to Work Here" over the book I'm currently reviewing. "You Don't..." is more realistic in its approach to psychiatry. And it's more personal – the author shares as much about himself as about the patients (which is only fair!). I highly recommend that book!
UK books, what's up with these clickbaity, tabloid, honestly meaningless titles? I'm fed up with them. This book is about schizophrenia and psychosis, but the title doesn't exactly tell you that. There's no poetry to the tilte either, in my opinion.
This is probably not the author's fault, but the title still made me annoyed with the book from the get-go👌
(Btw, I listened to the audiobook read by the author)
It didn't exactly ease my annoyance when the author started saying "so-called" before every psychiatric term, because of "controversy", like this: "so-called schizophrenia", "so-called mental illness", and so on.
Do you know what's more controversial than the term mental illness!? Putting "so-called" in front of the term every time you say it!!!!
Do you want me to constantly question everything at a word-for-word level while reading? Because that is quite frankly exhausting!
And I was not satisfied with his surface-level explanation for including the so-calleds. A little more of an in-depth analysis of this controversy would have been nice.
One last criticism: even though I think it's extremely important to be critical about psychiatric drugs, I am still a little worried that the way it's portrayed here, people will become all "medication is bad" after reading this, which is also unfortunate. Despite all their downsides, we should keep in mind that psychiatric drugs are life-saving for many people.
Now that I've told you about all my dislikes, let's move on to the positives😁
Fortunately, my annoyance eventually lessened, and I was able to get invested in the poignant stories that made up around half of the book.
I found the story about the young boy with hebephrenic schizophrenia to be really enlightening (and heartbreaking), since I've never quite understood this subcategory of schizophrenia. It shows how extremely varied (heterogenous) schizophrenia can be as an illness.
Also, one of the other stories about a mother was quite unlike anything I've read about schizophrenia before. The fact that these children lived with their mother in that state of mind for such a long time, is almost unfathomable.
So, yeah, I guess it wasn't toooo bad🙃 A mixed bag, I'd say.
I dedicate all my stars to the people that shared stories from their lives in this book.
A little recommendation:
I prefer the book "You Don't Have to be Mad to Work Here" over the book I'm currently reviewing. "You Don't..." is more realistic in its approach to psychiatry. And it's more personal – the author shares as much about himself as about the patients (which is only fair!). I highly recommend that book!