In 2022, during a period of creative and emotional crisis, Marianne Apostolides stumbled on a scientific article that would profoundly change her understanding of the human mind. Ten months later, she was interviewing the article’s lead author and embarking on a complex and revelatory journey to unravel current approaches to mental health.
Go/No-Go documents Apostolides’s quest to decipher the research underlying new treatments for mental disorders—and to understand how that research is reshaping our fundamental sense of ourselves. She talks with leading neuroscientists, gathering information about their studies, their methods, and the resulting treatments that are in the pipeline, soon to be offered to people. All the while, she reflects on her own experiences, making the science more immediate, understandable, and relevant.
With writing that’s propulsive yet tethered to hard data, Apostolides prompts us to look at how contemporary neuroscience is redefining who we are, and why we struggle. Through vital questions posed in the book, readers come to see the flaws and failures of the current approach to mental health—while also learning how society can change course to better support people in their own journey.
Combining scientific investigation with humour, empathy, and artistic curiosity, Go/No-Go is a groundbreaking addition to an urgent dialogue about mental health.
Praise for Go/No-Go: A Journey Into the Research and Treatment of Mental Health Disorders
“Marianne Apostolides’ Go/No-Go is an incisive, compelling, and brilliant look at the latest trends in mental health treatment and research. With a deft hand, Apostolides untangles the work of researchers attempting to engineer the human mind and charts the turn from community-based healthcare and evidence-based treatment to computational psychiatry and precision medicine. Intimate and revolutionary, Go/No-Go is required reading for anyone with a stake in mental health care.” —Miranda Newman, author of Rough Magic: Living with Borderline Personality Disorder
“Go/No-Go is a deeply considered and mature love letter to science—as complex and nuanced as any such study must be in an era of over-simplification. Readers who, like Apostolides, feel connected to mental health research will find in it an empathetic guide to new cognitive science. Scientists and clinicians themselves can read it as a fix to the false ‘love it or leave it’ polarization that undermines high-stakes research—and as an opportunity to bridge complex neuroscience with the daily lives of people living with mental health disorders. ‘This (book) is an effort to understand the theories and methods of mental health research so that we, as non-scientists, can know what is possible (and needed and wanted) in our own care,’ Apostolides writes. Her hope that we ‘place all interventions in the context of human relationships,’ is surely the foundation of a healthy approach to mental illnesses that burden all of our communities.” —Robert Steiner, Director, Dalla Lana Fellowship in Journalism and Health Impact, University of Toronto