Alex Riley is an award-winning science writer and the author of
A Cure for Darkness: The Story of Depression and How We Treat It, his first book. He received a best feature award from the Association of British Science
Writers for his reporting on The Friendship Bench, a project that began in Zimbabwe in 2006 and has since provided mental health care to thousands of people in New York. A former research scientist, he has co-authored peer-reviewed scientific papers while working at the Natural History Museum in London. Since leaving academia in 2015, he began writing popular science articles for magazines such as
New Scientist, PBS’s
NOVA Next,
BBC Future,
Mosaic Science,
Aeon, and
Nautilus Magazine.
At the
Guardian Riley tagged ten top books about depression, including:
The Inflamed Mind by Ed Bullmore
An accessible insight into psychoneuroimmunology, the study of inflammation, the brain and mental illness. While the subtitle, A Radical New Approach to Depression, suggests that this is a new science, it actually emerged decades ago and, as the author explains, has now found support from numerous fields of study. Epidemiology, immunology and trials into anti-inflammatories are finding that a subset of depressions stem from low-grade chronic inflammation.
Read about
the other entries on the list.
--Marshal Zeringue