Dr Russell Razzaque is a London based Consultant Psychiatrist with twenty years experience in adult mental health. He has consulted for a number of organisations during his career including the UK Home Office, the Ministry of Justice, the University of Cambridge, and he currently works in the NHS in east London. He is also a published author in human psychology and has written for several publications including The Independent, The Guardian and Psychology Today. Russell's special interest is mindfulness and he has been practicing and researching it for ten years - as well as teaching it to professionals - and he has publications in peer reviewed journals on the subject. A further interest is in understanding consciousness, and the connection between spirituality and mental health. Currently he is leading a national trial of a new form of mental health provision known as Open Dialogue.

This book explores an entirely new way of understanding psychological and mental distress based on Dr Razzaque's work as a consultant psychiatrist together with the insights he has gained as a regular practitioner of meditation. His extraordinary conclusion: mental illness can also be a form of spiritual awakening. Dr Razzaque provides evidence for this from a range of sources including direct clinical case material from his work in acute mental health services to the latest findings from neuroscience and the insights of meditative traditions. The book describes new forms of treatment for mental illness inspired by Eastern approaches and centering, in particular, around practices such as mindfulness. These therapies offer both patients and their families the inspiring idea that the approach to their psychological difficulties should go beyond just ''treating'' episodes of mental illness but also, where possible, help the individual to complete the process of spiritual growth they have begun. Dr Razzaque argues passionately that our society as a whole could benefit from developing an awareness of the spiritual power of this process of transformation. Written in the tradition of the bestselling insights of neuroscientist Eben Alexander and therapists Irvin D. Yalom and Oliver Sacks, Breaking Down is Waking Up, will speak to both professionals in the field of mental health as well as those suffering from mental illness, their family and friends and, indeed, all those who have an interest in exploring the deepest layers of what it really means to be human.