It's Not You. It's the World

It’s hard to view all our mental health symptoms as disordered if so many of us are experiencing them. Perhaps it’s not that something’s gone wrong in our bodies and minds, but that something’s gone right: These symptoms are brilliant alarms and adaptions to survive a disordered world. Having sensitive protective functions that sound alarms or short-circuit when we’re threatened isn’t a design flaw. It’s a design success. As a psychiatrist, professor, and mental health speaker, Joanna Cheek argues that we’re not broken or doing it wrong when we’re stressed or struggling. As our systems are pushed to the brink of collapse, self-improvement alone neglects the source of our suffering. Instead, to care for ourselves, we must heal the imbalances in our wider systems that keep making us all sick. In It’s Not You. It’s the World, Dr. Cheek offers a survival guide of mental health tools to care for both ourselves and our collectives, helping us understand and befriend our alarms so we can come together to solve the shared problems they’re signaling. With a foreword by Gabor Maté, chapter-by-chapter guidance, and practical action to empower, connect, and instill hope in the reader, It's Not You. It's The World is the go‑to guide for anyone feeling depressed, anxious, enraged, despairing, numb, or sick from adapting to a world on fire.