Searching for Normal: A New Approach to Understanding Mental Health, Distress, and Neurodiversity

By: Sami Timimi

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Synopsis: 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.