Why has nobody told me this before?

By Dr Julie Smith

Julie Smith, clinical psychologist and social media sensation, presents this book advising people on many common mental health problems.

This one has been a bestseller so let’s see if it provides real practical advice and whether any of it is unique, or if it really isn’t adding much to a heavily saturated field. It is perhaps good that mental health advice is now far more saturated, when this was a term often looked at with contempt. Now science and societal perception has made strides as to mental health being important and real, and something that people need to manage. So how well does this book provide a guide to do that?

The themes are broad. Chapters include on dark places, on self doubt, on a meaningful life, on stress. There isn’t really one central theme here, other than covering mental health in a broad manner. Some chapters take a theme such as anxiety, and spend one chapter covering the problem, including some anecdotes, and then a 1 page summary of bullet points before the second chapter answers what you can do in terms of the problem.

For some people a book like this might be useful. They may encounter things they were not aware of. I review a book like this with trepidation, because I often anticipate well meaning but surface level advice that is probably already present. Is that such a bad thing though? To produce books with similar advice about something that matters is perhaps still useful. In reviewing books though, we really are pitting a singular book against the opposition and the value it represents. And so, those works that provide something unique are more likely to receive higher scores.

As self-help books go then this book slots right into familiar territory. It’s readable, using simple and concise language, there being no real need to speak in metaphor or imagery where helping people is the main aim of the book. The work is fully sourced and backed up with scientific references, which is nice to see and not always the case in a book like this.

The problem is the advice is simplistic too. Though it is expert advice by somebody accredited, it is quite bare bones for some of these problems. This is perhaps unsurprising from how I’ve written this review, but take for example the problem of thoughts and mood pitfalls. The main advice is to reflect on thought biases, keeping a journal, write down thoughts feelings and sensations in the moment and mindfulness. If one had to write a list of mental health cliches these practices from CBT and journalling have got to be up there. It’s not that this is bad advice though – mind you, it’s just that if you picked up several books on the topic you’re getting the same information written in different ways, and in a very simplistic format. I’d say the format is so simplistic that if you wanted to delve deeper – which you often would have to with problems like these – you would need another book or two on the topic! I did, however, sometimes like how the advice was broken up by diagrams or bullet point ‘toolkit’ lists to present the information succinctly.

By contrast the coverage of death as a topic was interesting, exploring mindfulness about where we are in life, what we want to do, our values and priorities. It perhaps isn’t anything new still, but it was written well, and I do think the book is very cogent and flows well despite being so broad. Similarly despite much of the advice not being anything new, you do read and often find a particular line that resonates with you personally: which is how most self-help books tend to work really.

Final score

This book provides solid advice, and is likely a bestseller because of Dr Julie Smith’s recognition online. It provides good advice in a simplistic format. I do wonder if its too broad to give adequate depth to such problems, but would at least give a reader a starting point. Just don’t expect anything new.

6/10