“There seem to me to be two extreme, and implausible, strands of thought knocking around in the area of what we might problematically call “mental health”. The first leads to the medicalisation or pathologising of any kind of psychic distress. The other is the view that there’s no such thing as mental illness at all (even if you call it something other than illness). But if we agree the extreme views are both wrong, how do we distinguish between ordinary distress and differences in thought, and pathological states or conditions?”