Unshackled Mind: A Doctor’s Story of Trauma, Liberation and Healing By Cathy Wield. The Book Guild Ltd. 2025. £9.95 (pb). 344 pp. ISBN 9781835741443

Unshackled Mind, by Cathy Wield, has left its author 'free at last from the shackles of psychiatry, free from the shackles of evangelicalism and free from the shackles placed on a young child sent away to boarding school'.It is an unusual and compelling book, in that the first half retells a story previously told by the same author, of her experience of severe depression, hospitalisation, treatment with multiple drugs, electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and, ultimately, psychosurgery.Life after Darkness: A Doctor's Journey through Severe Depression (CRC Press, 2005) was a book that made me question psychiatric treatments and hospitalisation, I think rightly so, and this new book raises other questions.There are threads that spiral through both books, and views about these will differ.Early trauma often coexists with mental