The Unfragile Mind: Making Sense of Mental Health

by Gavin Francis

FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF ADVENTURES IN HUMAN BEING AND RECOVERY

This book is about the contours and landscapes of mental health. We experience the world through the filter of our emotions, but those emotions can be fickle as well as misleading. As human beings we have power over them, and when your feelings are bad, it can be helpful to remember that your being is something quite separate from them entirely.

The Unfragile Mind traces some of the routes through mental health that Dr Gavin Francis's patients have shown him over his decades as a physician. The twenty-first century has opened up vital conversations about 'mental weather': moods that bring gusts of panic, others that bring freezing fogs of despondency. Now, we need a new model of healthcare which moves beyond diagnosis and offers robust shelters to take cover in until the worst storms pass. What would a framework of mental wellness look like instead, one which understands the different landscapes of mental health we continuously move in and out of?

Featuring sensitive case studies from his own practice alongside conversations with therapists, psychiatrists and psychologists, Dr Gavin Francis examines the landscape of Western mental healthcare today and offers new perspectives on the maintenance of mental wellbeing.

Audible Audio

Expected publication February 12, 2026

About the author

Gavin Francis was born in Scotland in 1975, and has travelled widely on all seven continents. He has crossed Eurasia by motorcycle, and spent a year in Antarctica. He works as a medical doctor as well as a writer.

When travelling he is most interested in the way that places shapes the lives and stories of the people who live in them.

His first book, True North: Travels in Arctic Europe, explores the history of Europe's expansion northwards from the first Greek explorers to the Polar expeditions of the late 19th and 20th centuries. It was nominated for a William Mills Prize for Polar Books. Of it Robert Macfarlane wrote: 'a seriously accomplished first book, by a versatile and interesting writer... it is set apart by the elegance and grace of its prose, and by its abiding interest in landscapes of the mind. Francis explores not only the terrain of the far North, but also the ways in which the North has been imagined... a dense and unusual book.'

In 2011 he received a Creative Scotland Writer's Award towards the completion of a book about the year he spent living beside a colony of Emperor Penguins in Antarctica. Empire Antarctica will be published by Chatto & Windus in November 2012.