📚 Finished reading All in the Mind by Alastair Campbell.

In this novel we follow the life of Professor Sturrock over a few days. He’s a very well-regarded psychiatrist who treats all manner of patients who have severe mental illnesses of one kind or another. But they’re not the only ones struggling with day-to-day life, to say the least.

It always feels kind of risky to read a book written by any kind of “celebrity” who is known for something other than their writing skills. The author, Alistair Campbell, was most famously Tony Blair’s spin doctor, who turned out to be an extremely polarising figure back then. These days he co-hosts a wildly successful politics podcast, wherein he regularly expresses his love for his old party, Labour.

But, to give him credit, this book is not any kind of political rant. Sure, there’s a (fictional) MP in it, but he’s one amongst many characters, and there sure isn’t any veneration of any particular party in it.

Also kind of famously, Campbell himself went through a major mental health crisis in the past, something, again to give him credit, he is very open about and campaigns for improving the help similar sufferers get. I suppose he thus, unfortunately, writes from experience. Stephen Fry notes that he has “‘rarely read a book where the agonies and insecurities of mental trauma have been so well chronicled”.

Whilst not universally loved, I found the book to be a good, compulsive read, and the message underlying it is undoubtedly an important one.