I received a copy of this book through LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program, and I'm grateful for the publishers for the opportunity to read this. Also as a kind of disclaimer, I am a mentally ill person with a variety of diagnoses around trauma.

This was a fairly basic introduction, a little bit scattershot in how much it tried to cover, though the parts about Indigenous healing and culturally competent care were interesting. There were a couple gaps in this, the biggest one for me being around police and police work. Siebert talks about the rate of police violence against people with mental illness, but then goes in to talk about how police are being trained to be better and the good work they're doing. Given that most of the mentally ill people killed by police are BIPOC, it seems to me disingenuous and dangerous to represent police as anything other than incredibly dangerous, and I don't think putting in a single cop doing "good work" outweighs just how horrific interactions between police and folks with mental illness, especially racialized folks, are. Another gap for me was a lack of discussion around racialization and diagnosis; it seems significant to me that the Black people whose experiences she wrote about/talked to were diagnosed as schizoaffective, especially given the history of using the diagnosis of schizophrenia to incarcerate Black people and invalidate their experiences of racism.

There were still some good parts, though I think the most interesting parts of this book were literally sidelined; I deeply appreciated the inclusion of sections about harm reduction and mad pride, as I think those are things that it's very important for teenagers to learn about early on, as it could be life-saving; I think taking them more seriously, especially speaking to someone who identifies as mad or is a psychiatric survivor about involuntary hospitalization might have helped address some of the ambivalence that Siebert herself expressed in the book. Finally, I think an actual look inside at what hospitalization might look like could help demystify that process for teenagers, and might make them more likely to consider it as an option in a time when their agency is already so limited and giving up even more of it is often a terrifying process.

Overall it wasn't a bad book, and I think could be a useful starter to a larger conversation, but there were definitely parts that I had serious misgivings about and would adjust or supplement if using this book with actual teenagers.