Dr. Sami Timimi on 'Searching for Normal: Understanding Mental Health'

Following the conversation, we invite you to join us for a meet-and-greet with the author, book signing and light refreshments.

Searching for Normal, A New Approach to Understanding Mental Health, Distress, and Neurodiversity (Signal, Sept 2025)

Dr. Sami Timimi, Psychiatrist and Psychotherapist, UK's National Health Service

Moderator: Maja Djikic, Associate Professor, Part-time, Organizational Behaviour and Human Resource Management, Rotman School of Management

From an eminent child psychologist, a radical reframing of how we need to think about mental health.

What the general public are being told about the nature of mental health is misleading and may be harming our collective sense of well-being. Mental health ideology may be the biggest and most powerful cause of mental health problems today. Dr. Sami Timimi explains why he believes this to be the case and what we can, at an individual and collective level, do about it.

More and more people are being diagnosed with ADHD and mental disorders.

Young people are being medicalised for behaviours that might be as entirely normal in other parts of the world.

Distress has been commodified over many decades by pharmaceutical companies, the media, and the psychiatric establishment.

So how can we know when distress is normal and when it is something that needs to be treated?

In Searching for Normal, Dr. Timimi explores the political and cultural context of these phenomena and proposes an alternative, a deeply humane approach that looks at the person as a whole--their family context, their culture, their personal resilience--and advocates for a reframing of how we think about and treat distress.

Dr. Sami Timimi is a practicing consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist and psychotherapist in the UK's National Health Service. He has contributed to over forty books on subjects related to critical psychiatry, childhood, psychotherapy, depression, behavioural problems, and cross-cultural psychiatry; authored six books, including Naughty Boys: Anti-Social Behaviour, ADHD, and the Role of Culture; co-edited four books, including, Liberatory Psychiatry: Philosophy, Politics and Mental Health with Carl Cohen; and co-authored two others, including The Myth of Autism: Medicalising Men’s and Boys’ Social and Emotional Competence with Neil Gardiner and Brian McCabe. His most recent book, published in 2021, is Insane Medicine: How the Mental Health Industry Creates Damaging Treatment Traps and How You Can Escape Them.

Maja Djikic, Ph. D. is a personality psychologist specializing in adult development. She is an Associate Professor of Organizational Behaviour and Human Resource Management, Executive Director of the Self-Development Laboratory, and Academic Director of the Rotman Executive Coaching Certificate at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. She has published more than 35 articles and book chapters in the area of personality development. Her research has been featured in over 50 media outlets (including The New York Times, Salon, Slate, and The Scientific American Mind) in 15 countries. Maja has been selected by Thinkers50 as one of 30 thinkers around the world whose ideas have the potential to shape the future of organizations. Her first book, The Possible Self: A Leader's Guide to Personal Development will be published in March 2024 by Berrett-Koehler Publishers Inc.

This event is available to attend in-person or virtually via livestream.

Rotman Events is committed to accessibility for all people. If you have any access needs or if there are any ways we can support your full participation in this session, please email ZXZlbnRzIHwgcm90bWFuICEgdXRvcm9udG8gISBjYQ== no later than 2 weeks in advance of the event and we will be glad to work with you to make the appropriate arrangements.

• The event will be hosted in Desautels Hall at the Rotman School of Management (105 Saint George Street, Toronto, ON M5S 3E6). Your registration fee includes a copy of the book, meet-and-greet with book signing by the author, as well as access to a video replay of the session for 30 days.

• Rotman Events will email registrants a link to the livestream. Your registration fee includes access to the livestream, video replay for 30 days, a copy of the book and shipping fees. The book will be shipped to registrants after the event. Please allow 3 - 4 weeks for delivery.

• Unable to attend the event due to scheduling conflicts? Not to worry. All registrants (in-person or livestream) can access the full recording on-demand for one month after the live event.

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• In-person registrants who do not pick up their book at the event will have 5 business days to request postal delivery by emailing us at ZXZlbnRzIHwgcm90bWFuICEgdXRvcm9udG8gISBjYQ==. All unclaimed books will be returned to the publisher after that time.

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