Lucy Foulkes
autor
What Mental Illness Really Is... (and what it isn't)
We need to rethink the conversation around mental health - psychologist Lucy Foulkes explores how and why.
How do mental health problems arise?
How do we distinguish between the 'normal' challenges of modern life and actual illness?
Is society really experiencing a new mental health crisis?
In this urgently needed book, psychologist Lucy Foulkes investigates what we know about mental illness - and shines a light on what we don't. It offers a profound new approach to how we think, talk and help when it comes to mental health.
Losing Our Minds
We need to rethink the conversation around mental health.
Public awareness of mental illness has been transformed in recent years, but our understanding of what it actually is has yet to catch up. Too often, psychiatric disorders are confused with the inherent stresses and challenges of human experience. A narrative has taken hold that a mental health crisis has been building among young people in recent years - one that, with the arrival of Covid-19, is set to get far worse.
In this profoundly sensitive and constructive book, psychologist Lucy Foulkes argues that the crisis is one of ignorance as much as illness. Have we raised a 'snowflake' generation? Or are today's young people subjected to greater stress, exacerbated by social media, than ever before? Foulkes shows that both perspectives are useful but limited. As the effects of the pandemic take hold, the real question in need of answering is: how should we distinguish between 'normal' suffering and actual illness?
Drawing on her extensive knowledge of the scientific and clinical literature, Foulkes explains what is known about mental health problems - how they arise, why they so often appear during adolescence, the various tools we have to cope with them - but also what remains unclear: distinguishing between normality and disorder is essential if we are to provide the appropriate help, but no clear line between the two exists in nature. She presents the argument that the widespread misunderstanding of this aspect of mental illness might actually be contributing to its apparent prevalence.
Losing Our Minds provides both the clarity and the nuance that are so urgently needed.
Coming of Age
A leading expert in adolescent psychology transforms our understanding of this most formative life-stage
Adolescence is the most dramatic and formative period of our lives. It is when we become who we are, when the smallest things can have life-long effects. But it is also full of contradictions, making it bewildering to live through and widely misunderstood. We may struggle to understand the adolescents in our lives, but most of us have yet to come to terms with our own adolescence.
In this expert, empowering book, Lucy Foulkes draws on the latest research and in-depth interviews to demystify adolescent behaviours – friendship, risk-taking, sex, love, bullying and more – and expose the surprising and often moving reality beneath them. We see that teenagers are far more conservative than rebellious; that apparent recklessness is often calculated and risk-averse; that popularity is a mixed blessing even as friendships can be a life-changing good. We understand why social hierarchies are so fiercely policed, even while adolescents have an extraordinary capacity for empathy and mutual support; why appearances are overly important, and why rejection at this age hurts so much. We see that even the most difficult experiences are part of this essential and life-shaping process of self-discovery.
If our identities are a story, then the crucial first draft is written in adolescence. Coming of Age helps us read that story with clarity and compassion so that we can appreciate the adolescents we know but also those we once were – those wild and fragile people who helped us become who we are.
Vypredané
21,95 €
