Most of the time, this book was quite entertaining to read. It's style reminds me a lot of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

It took me a while to figure out how much of the contents was true, but everything I googled turned out to be real. I was especially intrigued by the anti-psychiatry wing of Scientologists, I had not heard about them before. I didn't expect Scientologists in this book to begin with, that was a surprise...

"Maybe it was the trying so hard to be normal that was making everyone so afraid they were going crazy."

In this quote, the best and the worst of this book is summarised. On the one hand, the conclusions are quite sound: there are mentally ill people, but probably nearly not as many as modern psychiatry and the drug industry has led us to believe. Defining mental illness is far from a clear-cut issue, but many professionals seem unwilling to admit that.

On the other hand, the way the book addresses mental illness is superficial and amorphous. It may be because it was narrated from Ronson's personal point of view and the story followed the development of his own thinking, but there was no discussion about defining mental illness besides the manuals he was looking into, or social perceptions of it – I don't know, but I just feel that some depth and critical reflection was missing.