And if they don't affect us directly, society itself is affected by them. So I thought, well, maybe there's room for that side of things to say, like, well, yes, we all know most people agree that mental health problems are genuinely real things and they affect us all in many different ways. So my knowledge and experience is very much a wide range in terms of the underlying science rather than the actual everyday experience. So I know I've been working on neuroscience for well over 20 years now and from undergraduate level and I spent like seven years as a psychiatry lecturer for a master's course. SA bit of that imposter syndrome phenomenon. So I thought, well, given I spent 20 years dabbling. But it's also like, well, that's not really the most persuasive argument. Because if I'm being very pessimistic, I would say the majority of mental health awareness campaigns, you can boil the message down to something like: depression is real, pass it on. I think you need to have an understanding of what's going wrong before you can really have any sort of genuine appreciation for the matters.

But personally, I've always felt that as good as that is and as noble and as useful there is, awareness is only part of the battle. Because there's a big push now, has been for many years, for mental health awareness, to raise awareness of it and to increase understanding. Unlike most mental health books you find in the market, all of which I find, it's not a sort of slur against anyone else, but it's a book about mental health as a process, as a scientific phenomenon, which we, sort of, we have a recognition of, an understanding of what's going on internally when our mental health declines or suffers or is compromised in some way. It's basically a book about mental health, but not.

Dean burnett neuroscientist