Gavin Francis for The Unfragile Mind

Gavin Francis on The Unfragile Mind

The last time Gavin Francis was here he delighted us with tales of connection for The Bridge Between Worlds. He returns with an urgent call for compassion in our understanding of mental health.

According to the National Institute for Mental Health, over fifty-nine million adults and nearly a fifth of adolescents in the US have been diagnosed with some form of mental illness, with about fifty percent receiving treatment. But for a population that's experienced an explosion of labeling and diagnoses over the last ten years, there remains a chasm between our cultural conversations about mental health and its real-life treatment by medical practitioners-and the drug and insurance companies who rule them.

Drawing on thirty years of medical experience, Dr. Gavin Francis delves into the tangled history of psychiatry and the problems-mood disorders, trauma, anxiety, and addiction-that he addresses daily in his patients' lives. Expertly reckoning with the historical treatment of mental illness and how it has evolved to reflect our current medical climate, Dr. Francis takes into consideration the multitude of roadblocks for those with mental health challenges, made worse by a system that seeks to benefit corporations, not patients.

With case studies and conversations with therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists, Dr. Francis takes a multifaceted approach to the constantly shifting landscape of mental health and makes an argument that centers the mind as something best treated with compassion, flexibility, and curiosity. The Unfragile Mind blends experience, history, and contemporary perspectives in a comprehensive assessment of how we can continue to evolve our perception of common-but often invisible-illnesses for the better.

Gavin Francis, MD, is a multi-award-winning author and GP who has worked across four continents as a surgeon, emergency physician, and medical officer with the British Antarctic Survey. He is the author of Sunday Times bestsellers Adventures in Human Being, Shapeshifters: On Medicine & Human Change, and Recovery: The Lost Art of Convalescence, and has been shortlisted for such awards as the Saltire Literary Award for Nonfiction Book of the Year, Costa Book of the Year, and the Ondaatje Prize. His writing also appears in The Wall Street Journal, NPR, The Guardian, The Times, the London Review of Books, and he is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books.