Books: Searching for normal a new approach to understanding mental health, Distress and Neurodiversity

Timimi Sami, 2025. 352. Searching for Normal: a New Approach to Understanding Mental Health, Distress and Neurodiversity. HB: Fern Press, 978-1911717126. 25.00. ![Graphic][1]</img> In our ‘mindful’ generation, we have seen a rise in mental health awareness and a burgeoning focus on wellbeing. Yet rates of mental illnesses are still skyrocketing. Where have we gone wrong? In this provocative book, Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist Sami Timimi sets about deconstructing our concept of mental health. Each chapter is book-ended with patient encounters collected across his years of experience, and are scenarios that we could instantly recognise from our own practice. He begins by pointing out the difficulty of objectively defining mental health and illness across different countries and cultures. Most African and Asian countries tend towards a collectivist culture, stressing the importance of unity and altruism. Western countries stress the individual, with autonomy and identity being valued more highly. In this context, he asks, what is wellbeing? He explains, ‘personhood in the Iraqi culture of my childhood is relational. The idea of self- care, self -love is not only culturally absent, but positively strange to someone whose concept of self is defined by relationships. How can you feel better in yourself without others to feel better with?’ From this standpoint, questions abound. Is an all-out pursuit of wellbeing healthy? Will this aversion of suffering drive out development of resilience? Are negative emotions all to be suppressed, in pursuit of a permanent state of ‘wellbeing’? Is what we hold out to patients actually attainable? Are we doing them a disservice by claiming it is? Timimi then tackles the concept of diagnoses in mental illness. He reminds us that unlike in physical disease processes, there is no objective, biological test to identify mental disorders. Diagnoses are based on a collection of symptoms and behaviours. The categories used in diagnostic manuals such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) lack causal or physiological frameworks … [1]: /embed/inline-graphic-1.gif