KIND OF BLUE
When psychologist Lucy Foulkes reflects on her mental breakdown in her early twenties, she’s amazed that the clear signs of distress were missed by herself and so many around her. It’s unlikely they would have been today, in a society so keenly aware – even preoccupied – with looking for and diagnosing mental-health issues.
Foulkes’ spiral into a severe episode of depression and anxiety saw her temporarily drop out of university, start taking psychiatric medication and begin intensive psychotherapy. The experience was terrifying, she writes in Losing Our Minds, her overview of our knowledge about the causes and nature of the most prevalent mental illnesses. But for her work, it has provided a useful insight into the minds of the mentally ill and the often thin barrier between being sad and clinically unwell.
“I have been interested in mental health for a long time, and I was interested that about 10-12 years ago, there was this explosion in efforts to talk more about it publicly, with campaigns and celebrities admitting to serious illnesses,” says Foulkes, 33, speaking to the Listener from her home in the UK.
“But I felt the more I read in the media and the more things I heard people say in private conversations, the messages they were getting weren’t even necessarily true, especially in terms of facts and statistics. It had gone from famine to feast.”
In the past decade, headlines about the mental-health “epidemic” have become commonplace and successive governments have scrambled with toothless review after intervention after toothless review.
Rates of antidepressant prescriptions have skyrocketed in the Western world, and more people than at any other time in history are self-identifying as mentally ill. Most affiliate with a depression or anxiety diagnosis – what Foulkes describes
