Now that Alastair Campbell has become a Labour party activist again, it's easy to forget that for a while he reinvented himself as a mental-health campaigner. His first novel is admirable in its attempts to show how mental illness can afflict apparently stable people - including his central character, a psychiatrist over-reliant on his patients and prostitutes. But All in the Mind is less good as a piece of fiction. For a book about psychology, there is remarkably little insight into the characters beyond what might be gleaned from a "signs of depression" leaflet. Pleasingly, however, Campbell does sketch for us an alcoholic MP brought down by a sex scandal. It's just as well the book's cover bears the words "A Novel" beneath its title.



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