Changing Minds: Our Lives and Mental Illness is a collection of short articles and poems written by people with a variety of mental health problems. The book has been compiled on behalf of the Royal College of Psychiatry and is interspersed with comments from health professionals. Such a project will inevitably have something of the curate's egg about it and I will go on to enlarge on what may seem a harsh comment on what is otherwise a worthwhile and well-presented attempt to demystify mental illness.

The contributions from ‘patients’ are poignant and enlightening. ‘A day with severe depression’ by Colin Edington is both touching and matter of fact in the way he portrays the overwhelming feelings of his depression and the hopelessness of knowing that friends and family wish he would and could ‘pull himself together’. Other contributors write on their experience of