Both I and my 20 year old granddaughter have found this book to be of immense help with our range of mental health issues. Dr Lynch who many years ago wrote Beyond Prozac and moved from General Practice to train as a Psychotherapist, having been dissatisfied with the limited range of help available to people with mental health problems. Both of his books have been based on a massive amount of world wide research into how mental health treatments are all too often, treated with medication, that does not work for am nay people, rather than seeking to explore the root cause of a patients problems. He argues, I think rightly, that Psychiatry is a very recent medical specialism and across the world Psychiatrists have allowed themselves to be far too easily convinced by the massive drugs companies that they have a pill for everything. He points our for instance, the psychiatrist have mostly subscribed to the false idea that depression is the result of a chemical imbalance in a patient, however as their is no known way of establishing such a chemical imbalance in patients. No blood test, no scan, or any other way to confirm such an imbalance. So how can any doctor then prescribe the correct amount of the expensive, highly profitable drugs to alleviate the patient's depression. They cannot. It is for instance well established that anti-depressants have no effect on around 40% of us. Dr Lynch's book explores the notion that all, or most, mental health conditions, from bi-polar, to anxiety disorders, depression or even Schizophrenia are the result of how an individual has coped or not coped,with the many trauma's they have encountered in life. I also believe that he quite rightly thinks that the route to regaining good mental health or as he prefers to call it, Selfhood, lies in providing patients with the tools to take control of the trauma's in their lives. The most fascinating feature of this amazing publication is that he illustrated it with loads of case histories of how his many patients have taken responsibility for their own mental health and survived in most cases with the minimum of medication. For anyone who feels that their mental health issues are not resolvable, and that they will never overcome them, this book gives enormous hope, and very practical help.