Searching for Normal

A Sunday Times Best Book of 2025

‘A brilliant book. I said “Hurrah!” and “Yes!” to every point Sami Timimi makes. A welcome antidote to the dangerous cult of overdiagnosis and the commodification of normal distress’ PHILIPPA PERRY

‘[A] terrific, thought-provoking book’ JOHANN HARI

How can we reconsider the way in which we think about, treat and care for those in distress?

More and more people are being diagnosed with ADHD and autism.

More and more people are being diagnosed with mental disorders.

Young people are being medicalised for behaviours that might be explained as entirely normal in other parts of the world.

Distress has been commodified over many decades by pharmaceutical companies, the media and the psychiatric establishment.

So how can we know when distress is normal and when it is something that needs to be treated?

In Searching for Normal, Sami Timimi explores the political and cultural context of these phenomena and presents a deeply humane approach that looks at the person as a whole – their family context, their culture, their personal resilience – and advocates for a reframing of how we think about and treat distress.

Author Biography

Dr Sami Timimi is a practicing consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist and psychotherapist in the NHS. He has written 40 book chapters, mainly in academic books, on subjects related to critical psychiatry, childhood, psychotherapy, depression, behavioural problems and cross-cultural psychiatry; authored six books, including Naughty Boys: Anti-Social Behaviour, ADHD and the Role of Culture; co-edited four books, including, with Carl Cohen, Liberatory Psychiatry: Philosophy, Politics and Mental Health; and co-authored two others including, with Neil Gardiner and Brian McCabe, The Myth of Autism: Medicalising Men’s and Boys’ Social and Emotional Competence. His most recent book, published in 2021, is Insane Medicine: How the Mental Health Industry Creates Damaging Treatment Traps and How You Can Escape Them.