Graham Thornicroft and Michele Tansella have written an altogether remarkable monograph. The Mental Health Matrix is lucid, written in such simple and spare language as to make its concepts transparent, free of cant and of special pleading. For all these reasons, it should have a profound impact on the provision of mental health services; that is, if it is read by the practitioners, the policy makers and the politicians who need to understand its basic principles. Thornicroft and Tansella present no new data; what they provide are new ways to determine what data are needed across domains and to assess available data to permit evidence-based, integrated conclusions.

Amidst the clamour of cost-containment, they have managed to do the unique. They highlight the importance of a population-based approach to mental illness, because of its health benefits, at the same time that they make the care of the individual patient the focus for clinical planning. In the United States, at least (and I suspect, this is not solely an American disease), ‘population medicine’ is a slogan often used to rationalise cost control by limiting services that might have benefited individual patients.Such rhetoric is absent from this volume. Better care can be less expensive care when ineffective high cost procedures and episodic interventions are replaced by integrated services, but the goal must be the provision of care that benefits patients rather than investors or managers (or mental health workers!).