There are minds and there are bodies. On this basic division of the human state the world largely agrees, with fundamental consequences for the treatment of physical and mental health, regarded as two distinct branches of medicine.

But what if this essential mind/body split was false at source - an unhelpful illusion? What if thinking about mental health in these terms was doing nobody any favours, least of all the patient?

In this follow-up to his bestselling book The Inflamed Mind, Professor Edward Bullmore draws on more than 30 years of lived experience as a psychiatrist and neuroscientist to tell the story of schizophrenia and the under-examined history of psychiatry itself. Coming to terms with psychiatry's dark past in the Europe of the mid-twentieth century, the book tracks the galloping growth of brain and mind science in our time and shares optimistic prospects for our future way of thinking about what we now call mental health disorders.