The full text of this book is free at psychologyforeveryone.com. Printed copies are sold at printing cost only; the author takes nothing. That was decided before the first chapter was written, and it is the most important decision in it.
I was brought up to believe, as millions of Indian families are, that knowledge is not goods. A teacher gave; a student served and listened; a village, a temple or a household fed them both. What was learned was handed on, and it was never put on a counter. The old saying is short enough to learn in one breath: vidyā-dānaṃ mahāpuṇyam, the gift of knowledge is a great merit.
Mental health knowledge is exactly the kind of knowledge that should travel freely. A person in distress should not need a library card, a fee or a particular passport to learn what a panic attack is, or why grief is not a weakness, or when a family should call a doctor. Most people who suffer silently do so because the first door was closed to them by cost, by language, by shame, or by plain jargon.
For that reason this book is not published for profit. It is offered as a gift: free to read, free to copy and pass on whole, free to print and place in a clinic waiting room, a school library, a village reading room or a family bookshelf. There is no copyright on it: no rights are reserved, so no one needs permission to copy, translate or share it. If any money ever comes from it, through donations or through a printing cost recovered, it will go back to social wellbeing and care, as the Notice of Gift states, and never to the author.
A gift is not a substitute for a professional. Doctors, psychologists, counsellors and nurses spend years in training and deserve to be paid fairly for their skilled work; nothing here argues otherwise. The tradition itself never asked a teacher to starve. What it asked was narrower and, I think, still right: that the basic understanding of one’s own mind be given and not sold. Read this book as a friend who tells you what the sign on the door says. The doctor is inside.
A word about credit
The idea of this book, its plan, its compilation, its writing and its design are my work, and I answer for its mistakes. But most of what stands in these pages is knowledge, and knowledge is never one person’s. It comes from teachers and textbooks, from public-health bodies and clinics, from friends, from my family’s kitchen table, from classical verses that are many centuries old, and from readers who wrote to correct me. I do not claim to have discovered any of it. I claim only to have gathered it with care and tried to say it plainly. Thanks to all of them are given on the Acknowledgements page.
If you take one thing from these pages, take it and pass it on.
— Satish Zope
This book is for education and general awareness. It does not replace diagnosis or treatment by a qualified professional. If anyone is in danger, contact your local emergency services.