Mental distress has become one of the key 'public issues' of the 21st century. According to the World Health Organization, depression currently affects 350 million people.

Politics of the Mind: Marxism and Mental Distress looks at the link between the economic and political system under which we live - capitalism - and the enormously high levels of mental ill-health which we see in the world today.

The book ends by looking ahead to a world driven not by the demands of profit but on based on meeting human needs - a world which the Marxist psychoanalyst Erich Fromm called 'a sane society'.