This book was alright.

There were several interesting connections between infections and mental illness.

But, I found myself wanting much more. Whenever something interesting was mentioned, I felt like it wasn’t elaborated on enough. The book wasn’t exactly short, but it definitely felt stretched thin, with too much filler and not enough lingering on the fascinating points.

This book is completely germ-theory-oriented. I am more on the terrain theory side and so I felt a lot of the book was tedious. Even just a bit of terrain perspective would have made the thesis much more balanced.

Finally, very little was offered in terms of solution. It did a pretty good job of making the case that a lot of mental illnesses are really infections. But, besides passing mention of antibiotics, there was hardly any discussion of the underlying causes or cures for those infections (as I am assuming that antibiotics will not be adequate in many cases).

It wasn’t a bad book. But it definitely wasn’t great. It was clearly geared so much towards a popular audience that it threw nuance out the window, and was not very satisfying as a result.