AM I MENTAL? - Staying Sane in a World Gone Mad (Paperback)

ARE YOU LOSING IT - OR JUST LIVING IN 2025?
If your brain now treats everyday life like a hazard course - emails as landmines, meetings as moral tests, family group chats as endurance sports - this book is your spotter on the course.

Am I Mental? - Staying Sane in a World Gone Mad is a wry, practical field guide to modern mind-noise: the productivity cult, the happiness hustle, the anxiety economy, the illusion of control, and the irresistible urge to escape. Across clear, punchy chapters you'll learn to run quick sanity checks, turn down the ambient noise, and build routines that keep you upright when the culture won't.

WHAT YOU'LL GET
- Sanity diagnostics you can actually use: Noise Tolerance, Social Calibration, Decision Friction, and Control Flexibility
- A simple scoring model to track sleep, focus, people, patterns, and recovery - no jargon, no fluff
- Practical fixes: five-minute resets, small experiments, and repeatable routines that survive real-world chaos
- Humour, not hectoring: plain UK English with just enough bite to keep it honest

WHO THIS BOOK IS FOR
- People who feel over-stimulated, under-slept, and permanently "on"
- Builders, carers, freelancers, founders, parents, managers - anyone juggling too many tabs (in the browser and in their head)
- Readers who prefer clear tools over vague pep talks

WHAT'S INSIDE (AT A GLANCE)
- The Productivity Cult: why optimisation became a belief system - and how to step off the treadmill without falling behind
- The Happiness Hustle: the pressure to "feel great" all the time (and the saner alternative)
- The Anxiety Economy: when stress becomes a market and how to stop being its best customer
- Control Addiction: why white-knuckling makes things worse - and what to do instead
- The Great Escape: healthy repair vs. numbing avoidance (and how to tell the difference)

HOW TO USE IT
- Dip in for a quick diagnostic when you're spiralling
- Run the score weekly to see where you're drifting
- Pick one small nudge, repeat it for seven days, then add the next

WHAT THIS BOOK IS NOT
- Not therapy, not a diagnosis manual, not a "rise at 5am or fail" sermon. It's a practical toolbox for non-dramatic stability in a dramatic world.

Note on scope: This book distils research, interviews, and conversations with clinicians and people who have experienced mental ill-health first-hand. It is not medical advice. If you're in crisis or suspect a clinical condition, please seek professional care.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dean Armstrong writes about how ideas harden into habits - and how those habits shape our days. He blends research, interviews, and lived observation across media, work, and technology. He prefers clarity to clichés, and humour to hand-waving.

IF YOU'RE READY TO FEEL LESS FRIED AND MORE STEADY
Start with the fastest probe that fits your day, score it, make one small change, and repeat. Sanity isn't a personality; it's a practice. This book shows you how to build it.

Dean Armstrong is a writer-researcher who studies how ideas harden into institutions-and how institutions quietly shape our choices. His work sits at the intersection of policy, economics, media and technology, tracing theory to consequence. He cares less for slogans than mechanisms: incentives, defaults, algorithms, and feedback loops that run in the background of daily life. He prizes evidence over rhetoric. Often skeptical never snide.

His book, I'm Not Racist, I Want My Country Back!, braids storytelling with systems thinking to examine race relations, white privilege, nationalism, colonialism, apartheid, migration, media bias, and algorithmic power. It asks why nostalgia persuades, why hierarchies endure, and how language, law, code, and capital co-produce our social reality. The voice is clear, unsentimental, and-by design-thought-provoking and uncomfortable.

Dean has worked across technology and public communication for years, with hands-on experience in business, e-commerce, retail, and strategic communications. He has written numerous investigative pieces and long-form research for clients, and is frequently asked to edit, advise, and contribute across major media channels and podcasts. His writing has been admired by editors and authors who value his ability to convert complex systems into crisp, practical explanations.

Having lived and worked on several continents, Dean writes with a global lens without centering biography. He writes for readers who prefer clarity to comfort and want tools, not tribes. When he isn't drafting chapters, he prototypes small products that help people reason, collaborate, and govern their time and attention. He has studied and worked across music, business, and technology, a broad base that informs his cultural analysis.

Dean is now expanding his catalogue-continuing his work in cultural critique and systemic racism whilst developing his first self-help title with the same rigorous, plain-spoken approach to personal decision-making and everyday governance.

Themes readers search for: racism and anti-racism, race relations, white privilege, systemic racism, colonialism and empire, apartheid, nationalism and populism, cultural memoir and mixed-race perspectives, adoption stories, media studies and propaganda, political commentary, sociology, social psychology, identity and belonging, critical thinking, uncomfortable must-read nonfiction, podcast companion content.