Our society is seeing an epidemic of mental illness, and the line between mental health and ill-health has never been more blurred. In 2019, two-thirds of young people in the UK felt they had a mental disorder; by 2024 one in four adults was on psychiatric medication. Ninety per cent of this mental healthcare is delivered by GPs.
In The Unfragile Mind, GP and author Gavin Francis explores the many landscapes of the mind he has encountered in thirty years of practice, as well as the history of ideas of mental health. Featuring sensitive case studies alongside conversations with therapists, psychiatrists and psychologists, he writes about the problems of anxiety, mood, trauma, addictions, neurodiversity and others. He shows that our minds are not brittle or rigid, they are dynamic, resilient and adaptive: they are not fragile, but unfragile. The labels we apply to the life of the mind can be helpful, but also self-fulfilling. He argues that to reverse the mental illness epidemic we should learn to hold those labels lightly, and with more curiosity, kindness, humility, and hope.
Dr Gavin Francis has worked across four continents as a GP and emergency physician. He is the bestselling author of Recovery, Intensive Care and Adventures in Human Being. He writes about health and medicine for the Guardian, London Review of Books and The Times, among others.
