From an eminent child psychologist, a radical reframing of how we need to think about mental health.
What the general public are being told about the nature of mental health is misleading and may be harming our collective sense of well-being. Mental health ideology may be the biggest and most powerful cause of mental health problems today. Dr. Sami Timimi explains why he believes this to be the case and what we can, at an individual and collective level, do about it.
More and more people are being diagnosed with ADHD and mental disorders.
Young people are being medicalised for behaviours that might be as entirely normal in other parts of the world.
Distress has been commodified over many decades by pharmaceutical companies, the media, and the psychiatric establishment.
So how can we know when distress is normal and when it is something that needs to be treated?
In Searching for Normal, Dr. Timimi explores the political and cultural context of these phenomena and proposes an alternative, a deeply humane approach that looks at the person as a whole--their family context, their culture, their personal resilience--and advocates for a reframing of how we think about and treat distress. "Sami Timimi is one of the most brave and wise voices in Britain. Everyone interested in thinking in a deeper way about what's ailing us – and what isn't ailing us! – should read this terrific, thought-provoking book." - Johann Hari, author of Stolen Focus
"A brilliant book. I said "Hurrah!" and "Yes!" to every point Sami Timimi makes. A welcome antidote to the dangerous cult of overdiagnosis and the commodification of normal distress." - Philippa Perry, author of The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (and Your Children Will Be Glad That You Did) DR. SAMI TIMIMI is a practicing consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist and psychotherapist in the UK's National Health Service. He has contributed to over forty books on subjects related to critical psychiatry, childhood, psychotherapy, depression, behavioural problems, and cross-cultural psychiatry; authored six books, including Naughty Boys: Anti-Social Behaviour, ADHD, and the Role of Culture; co-edited four books, including, Liberatory Psychiatry: Philosophy, Politics and Mental Health with Carl Cohen; and co-authored two others, including The Myth of Autism: Medicalising Men's and Boys' Social and Emotional Competence with Neil Gardiner and Brian McCabe. His most recent book, published in 2021, is Insane Medicine: How the Mental Health Industry Creates Damaging Treatment Traps and How You Can Escape Them.
