US President George H. W. Bush proclaimed on 18 July 1990 that the 1990s were to be the decade of the brain. Much money was spent, and biological psychiatry became dominant in international research for much longer than 10 years. Unfortunately, all of this effort was not very productive in terms of exploitable technologies, nor anything tangible that benefited patients. By 2017, Sir Robin Murray had written an extended mea culpa in the Schizophrenia Bulletin, which included the confession that he had ignored social factors for most of his distinguished career. The pendulum had well and truly swung back. This text is a contribution to the recent literature about the importance of social factors, which is now well established and accepted by researchers of every ilk.

As a social psychiatrist who endured the long, barren years while the biological ruled, I greatly welcome this book. The editors are Rachel Tribe, Professor of Applied Psychology at the University of East London, and Dinesh Bhugra, truly an elder statesman of social psychiatry and anti-imperialism in mental health, not to mention a champion of legally enforceable human rights. Professor Bhugra has been President of the Royal College, the BMA and the World Psychiatric Association. This book should have a place in any psychiatric library. It is well referenced, with some outstanding contributions, such as Jed Boardman on social exclusion.

The book has a distinctive take on its subject, which is broadly social justice and antidiscriminatory practice. Some of its positions will cause disagreement. There is much here about equality of opportunity: a legitimate concern for sure, though others are more concerned with actual material inequality. This book promotes CAREIF, a charity that advocates for worldwide mental health. It has a strong emphasis on psychotherapeutic and clinical psychology practice, less so on the strictly psychiatric, as illustrated by one of the editors’ chapters on supervision, which recommends the Power Threat Meaning Framework (PTMF) as a tool. The authors of the PTMF have aspirations for it to be regarded as a new paradigm, but without any specific evidence in its favour. Although it is controversial to some psychiatrists concerned with social justice, such is the polarisation of the debate that this may increase its appeal to clinical psychologists. Unfortunately, there is a growing worldwide conservative movement that is against social justice in general. Socially concerned clinicians and researchers must swallow their differences and make common cause in opposing it.

Each chapter ends with points for debate, which illustrates the book’s main weakness – an uncertainty as to whether it is a work of scholarship, a polemic, a guide to progressive practice or all three, as suggested by the title. However, this strengthens the contents value as a trigger to discussion. This book is recommended as a major contribution to the literature.