All in Your Head
Illness as Identity, Trauma as Fashion, and the Desire to be Disordered
$50.99
- Hardcover
336 pages
- Release Date
15 December 2026
Summary
From the author of The Cult of Smart comes a searing account of the ways in which mental health culture and online discourse distort our understanding of mental illness, abandons the severely ill, and threatens the lives of millions who desperately need care.
Mental health culture in the 21st century is broken. After decades of influence from the anti-psychiatry movement, our conception of mental illness has become hopelessly romanticized, distorted by fictio…
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781668081037 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 1668081032 |
| Author: | Fredrik deBoer |
| Publisher: | Simon & Schuster |
| Imprint: | Simon & Schuster |
| Format: | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages: | 336 |
| Release Date: | 15 December 2026 |
| Weight: | 440g |
| Dimensions: | 22mm x 140mm x 213mm |
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Critics Review
“As someone whose own misdiagnosis nearly killed her, I know how much labels matter. In All in Your Head, Fredrik deBoer follows the aftershocks of the 1970s antipsychiatry movement to the current rise of TikTok self-diagnosis, exposing the dangers of turning illness into identity and offering a necessary corrective to the mental illness meme culture running rampant on and off our screens. Bold, bracing, and badly needed, All in Your Head is a must-read.”
—Susannah Cahalan, New York Times bestselling author of Brain on Fire
“All in Your Head is one of those books that asks uncomfortable questions yet provides practical answers. Patients, families, clinicians, and policy makers will find this book provocative because it is both a defense of and a critique of psychiatry. But it is ultimately hopeful and personal and a must read for anyone who cares about serious mental illness.”
—Thomas R. Insel, MD, former Director, National Institute of Mental Health
“Fredrik deBoer is the smartest and most relentless cultural commentator I’m aware of, particularly regarding modern mental health and the nauseating “culture” that engulfs it. In this book, he delivers a pitiless survey of the current mental health landscape, the shocking and insightful history of how we arrived here, and a blunt prescription for improving the treatment of the least considered (yet most important) people in this whole debacle: The Truly Mentally Ill. My friends openly make fun of me for how often I send them DeBoer’s writing. Now you can make fun of me too. Have you read his new book, All in Your Head? He’s so sharp. You gotta read it.”
—Neal Brennan
Fredrik deBoer
Fredrik deBoer is a writer and academic. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, New York magazine, The Boston Globe, Playboy, and Harper’s Magazine, among many others. He is the author of The Cult of Smart, How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement, and the novel The Mind Reels. He holds a PhD in English with a concentration in writing assessment and higher education policy from Purdue University. He lives in Connecticut with his family.
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