On its face, Profiles in Mental Health Courage is a book about the personal. Award-winning medical journalist Stephen Fried and former congressman and mental health advocate Patrick J. Kennedy spent hundreds of hours in conversation with people—some of them famous, most of them more ordinary—living with mental illness and its consequences.

In the introduction, the authors write, “The inability of people to understand the actual challenges of these illnesses, and to learn about them and empathize with them, is as big an epidemic as the diseases themselves.”