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No further evidence is needed to show that 'mental illness' is not the name of a biological condition whose nature awaits to be elucidated, but is the name of a concept whose purpose is to obscure the obvious.

Mental illness can happen to anybody. You can be a dustman, a politician, a Tesco worker... anyone. It could be your dad, your brother or your aunt.

It is difficult to write about any form of mental disease, especially your own, without sounding as if you were examining a bug under glass.

Only the emerging specialty of psychoanalysis seemed to understand that mental maladies are not fully analogous to physical disease. They resist classification, and might better be known by their symptoms and the individualized sufferings of patients than by assigned names.

People are always selling the idea that people with mental illness are suffering. I think madness can be an escape. If things are not so good, you maybe want to imagine something better.

I'm a big proponent of having a mental health component go along with whatever the physical realities are.

Any other illness, any other disease that we're faced with, there's sympathy and understanding. We get help for those. With mental illness, our go-to is to categorize them as, 'Oh, they're crazy,' to belittle the problem.

Mental health can be just as important as physical health - and major depression is one of the most commonly diagnosed mental illnesses.

It's my belief that, since the end of the Second World War, psychology has moved too far away from its original roots, which were to make the lives of all people more fulfilling and productive, and too much toward the important, but not all-important, area of curing mental illness.