Anne Cooke is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist. She is Principal Lecturer and Clinical Director of the Doctoral Programme in Clinical Psychology, Salomons Centre for Applied Psychology, Canterbury Christ Church University, UK. She writes regularly for the Centre’s blog Discursive of Tunbridge Wells. Anne worked in the British National Health Service for many years, leading psychology services in psychiatric hospitals and mental health teams. She has co-edited two major reports for the British Psychological Society’s Division of Clinical Psychology: Recent Advances in Understanding Mental Illness (2000) and Understanding Bipolar Disorder (2010), and was the editor of Understanding Psychosis and Schizophrenia: Why people sometimes hear voices, believe things that others find strange, or appear out of touch with reality, and what can help (British Psychological Society Division of Clinical Psychology, 2014). She is interested in the power of ideas, particularly the idea of ‘mental illness.