{"id":273528,"date":"2026-01-31T10:12:11","date_gmt":"2026-01-31T10:12:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/273528\/"},"modified":"2026-01-31T10:12:11","modified_gmt":"2026-01-31T10:12:11","slug":"better-mental-health-with-less-pill-popping","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/273528\/","title":{"rendered":"Better mental health (with less pill popping)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cBe not solitary, be not idle. Unhappy ones, have hope; happy ones, be cautious.\u201d So wrote the priest and scholar Robert Burton in his treatise The Anatomy of Melancholy<\/a>, published in 1621. It\u2019s great advice and despite the astonishing medical advances of the subsequent 400 years, nobody has improved on it all that much. <\/p>\n

Innovations from psychotherapy to Prozac have made lofty claims about reducing psychological suffering, but Britons are now reporting the highest levels of mental ill health yet recorded. We have sent probes to Mars and created artificial intelligence, but it seems we are still clueless when it comes to our happiness.<\/p>\n

So what is going on? Are we, despite the relative material luxury of our lives, more unhappy than ever before? Or have we just invented new ways of classifying and reporting our distress? What can we actually do to look after ourselves and the people we love?<\/p>\n

\u2022 Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression \u2014 and the Unexpected Solutions by Johann Hari<\/a><\/p>\n

In his fascinating and beautifully written book The Unfragile Mind, the GP Gavin Francis addresses these questions with a winning combination of pragmatism and compassion. His message is that mental health is more cultural and social, and less medical, than we often think. <\/p>\n

He starts by emphasising that a human mind is not a problem but a thing of wonder that no science or technology has even begun to understand. \u201cOur minds are not brittle or rigid,\u201d he writes in his opening chapter. \u201cThey are dynamic, resilient and adaptive: they are not fragile, but unfragile.\u201d <\/p>\n

\"Illustration<\/p>\n

Francis introduces us to the mind first through his experience as an anatomist, dissecting the web of nerves and tissues that somehow \u2014 nobody has any idea how \u2014 facilitate consciousness. Emotions might seem abstract, but they take a physical form; he uncovers the fibres behind the eye that govern weeping, \u201cthis tangle of nerves where thought or feeling becomes water\u201d. Later, he notices that in one of his cadavers \u2014 covered with prison tattoos \u2014 the muscles needed for a smile have withered while those that pull the forehead into a frown are strong and thick.<\/p>\n

He prefers metaphors for the mind that have a mystical or organic quality: it is a galaxy, a rushing river, an \u201cenchanted loom\u201d. This is not the language of mainstream psychiatry with its ever-expanding lists of disorders and dysfunctions. The first iteration of the American asylum manual, published in 1918, included 22 potential diagnoses \u2014 the most recent, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, has 400 categories of mental disorder. <\/p>\n

Psychiatry\u2019s obsession with labelling and classification might be helpful for insurance companies, but is less so for humans. Although sometimes naming a problem can help a patient, Francis says, \u201cthis might be at the cost of a more dynamic and hopeful perspective on their state of mind\u201d. It also cultivates an unjustified sense of certainty in the professionals. When it comes to minds we need to get comfortable with doubt.<\/p>\n

\u2022 \u2018We are becoming the victims of too much medicine\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n

Francis uses case studies inspired by patients in his Edinburgh general practice to bring the complexities of mental health care to life. The GP\u2019s-eye view is unique since it is they, more than the specialists, who deal with most of society\u2019s distress. \u201cMy education hadn\u2019t prepared me for just how ubiquitous anxiety is, or paranoia, or depression, or insomnia \u2014 often among people who are pretending to everyone else in their community that they are doing fine\u2026 only a minuscule proportion of sufferers ever make it into a psychiatrist\u2019s office.\u201d <\/p>\n

\"GP<\/p>\n

\u201cOur minds are not brittle or rigid. They are dynamic, resilient and adaptive\u201d, writes Francis<\/p>\n

JAMES GLOSSOP FOR THE TIMES<\/p>\n

To anyone who has recently tried to access mental health care through their GP, Francis\u2019s account of his consultations might seem unfamiliar. He sees one anxiety sufferer \u201conce or twice a month for a year\u201d and discusses some sophisticated stuff like helping his patients to understand the impact of childhood trauma. Perhaps things are different in Scotland, but where I live a patient will be lucky to see the same doctor twice and will almost invariably leave with a prescription for antidepressants. <\/p>\n

This in itself is depressing because, as Francis makes clear, the evidence is that they don\u2019t work. Between 75 and 82 per cent of any benefit obtained from antidepressant drugs is believed to derive from the placebo effect. They don\u2019t reduce the suicide rate and some studies suggest that they actually slow down recovery: 85 per cent of depressions that are untreated recover on their own within 12 months. Even so, GPs are still \u201cprescribing more than ever before but mental illness rates continue to rise\u201d.<\/p>\n

Would talking therapy be better? Not necessarily. While there is no doubt that trusting relationships are essential for good mental health, it doesn\u2019t seem to matter much whether you go for psychoanalysis, CBT, counselling or less formal support networks. As far back as the 1960s a study compared the results of sessions with senior psychotherapists and those with laypeople who had had just a couple of years\u2019 training: it found that the laypeople\u2019s results were as good as the psychotherapists.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Read more book reviews and interviews \u2014 and see what\u2019s top of the Sunday Times Bestsellers List<\/a><\/p>\n

The inconvenient truth is that our healthcare system is set up to treat individuals and mental health is intimately bound up with wider society and culture. As Francis writes: \u201cThe West\u2019s 20th-century focus on individualism has led to us creating maps of the mind that have many blind endings.\u201d Outcomes are much better for schizophrenics in countries including Ethiopia and Sri Lanka than they are in the West probably because it\u2019s more possible for them to retain their community connections. <\/p>\n

Even a problem such as anxiety manifests differently in different cultures. In Korea hwa byung is described as a constriction in the chest, in Nigeria ode-ori is characterised by a feeling of heat in the head. In south and east Asia there is an anxiety syndrome linked to semen loss and in Afghanistan the many varieties of anxiety include deltangi (\u201cthe space that occupies my heart becomes smaller\u201d).<\/p>\n

Our minds are inescapably, thoroughly social. Newer scientific approaches are confirming that \u201cour wellbeing is about more than chemicals or cells \u2014 it\u2019s about relationships\u201d. Network theory, proposed by the Dutch psychologist Denny Borsboom, is a conception of mental illness that puts the emphasis on symptoms and how to alleviate them rather than causes or diagnoses. Could that kind of approach ameliorate the symptoms of living in a highly individualistic society? It would be good to find out. <\/p>\n

The Unfragile Mind by Gavin Francis (Profile \u00a318.99 pp304). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk<\/a>. Free UK standard P&P on orders over \u00a325. Special discount available for Times+ members<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cBe not solitary, be not idle. Unhappy ones, have hope; happy ones, be cautious.\u201d So wrote the priest…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":273529,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[103,61,60,410,411],"class_list":{"0":"post-273528","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mental-health","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-mental-health","12":"tag-mentalhealth"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273528","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=273528"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273528\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/273529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=273528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=273528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=273528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}