Are We Well?

How the new mental health aware world—puzzling, alarming, and exasperating—has been constructed.

Are We Well? takes a bird’s-eye look at the rapidly rising public profile of mental health in recent decades. Clinical psychologist Derek Bolton and psychiatrist Mohammed Abouelleil Rashed explore not only individual, family, and social mental health perspectives, but also the expansion of the mental health world, the growing media attention to high levels of mental health difficulties, and the concerns that our current hyperawareness of the topic may be overreaching.

The book focuses on major changes in Western psychiatry and culture since the mid-twentieth century, highlighting the twin policy directions of deinstitutionalization—the closing of large mental hospitals to be replaced by care in the community—and the planned development of public mental health services for the population at large. The authors argue that both movements unsettled long-held ideas about mental disorder, normality, and how we distinguish between them, prompting a period of reconstruction that is still unfolding.

Drawing on a wide range of topics in psychiatry, including diagnostics, epidemiology, and causes and treatments, the book also discusses cultural and political dimensions such as mental health activism (from civil rights to Mad Pride), responses to stigma and social exclusion, emerging concepts like neurodiversity, and widespread social acceptance of diagnostics and treatments.