Cook, Joanna. Making a mindful nation: mental health and governance in the twenty‐first century. 216 pp. , bibliogr. Princeton: University Press, 2023. 26. 95 (paper)

In the United Kingdom, the financial crisis meaningfully came to roost at exactly the same time that the new coalition government came into power. What followed was the inception of a series of policies which ushed into existence austerity politics and widescale welfare reform aiming to get people who were not working into work, a move further solidified by the Conservative government that followed. At the same time, the state of the nation's mental health began to make headlines. Of the UK residents who lost their jobs in 2010, 71 per cent suffered symptoms of depression, 52 per cent experienced symptoms of anxiety; unemployment rose by more than 5 per cent for people with mental health problems. Making a mindful nation meticulously documents the lineage of mindfulness practices, the rise of its mass popularity, and why it became so prominent amongst Westminster policymakers, resulting in Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) becoming a key part of the National Health Service (NHS) toolkit for mental healthcare and resilience and many other applications besides. However, Cook's analytical focus moves beyond contention with ‘changing social categories and expert practices to examine the values and efforts with which people navigate the world’ (p. 8), setting out the necessary and mutual importance of and interconnection between history, social infrastructure, human praxis, and why and how her interlocutors, including MBCT practitioners, people seeking healing, volunteer advocates, celebrities and policymakers, came to promote mindfulness as key to the ethical pursuit of living a good life. In the Introduction, Cook adeptly lays out the dual resonance of Buddhist-based mindfulness to developing scientific ideologies and the romantic concepts linked to Western perceptions of Eastern religiosity during the nineteenth century. Mindfulness here emerges as the means of dealing with existence, pain, loss; dealing with spirituality but remaining secular. This history of mindful practices supports deeper understanding of the interlocutors whose narratives inform the first third of the book. Their individual accounts extol the ways MBCT supports positive mental health in different people's lives. Cook shifts her own and her readers’ attention to the recognition and cultivation of presence in the mundanity of everyday tasks, an intense attention that focuses the mind not in order to transcend (although this is debated by Cook's interlocutors), but in order to ground oneself, to be aware of exactly where one is relative to such mundanity, focusing so much on living in everyday tasks that they take on extraordinary meaning; here Woolf's Clarissa Dalloway's table setting is brought to dwell within discussion of the everyday ethics of Lambek, and the meaning-making of Das's tea crafted specifically as a loved one prefers it; all three work in concert as Cook considers the impact of mindfulness on quotidian actions, their value more typically missed. In chapters 4–6, readers are introduced to the often-hidden moving parts and people of the UK's Westminster policy machine. Cook's careful meting out of the popular and the scholarly affords the reader not only a fly-on-the-wall glimpse of the policy process but also allows us to better understand why MBCT took the kind of hold it did in both policy and popular culture in the mid-2010s. For instance, Cook foregrounds a talk delivered by comedian and mental health activist, Ruby Wax, then incorporates testimony from one ex-offender who explains that mindfulness helps to re-direct thought. This mirrors the practical approach taken to winning over MPs through group mindfulness sessions undertaken on the Parliament floor. It becomes clear that what is required to make policy happen is built on numbers, and that this challenges individual conviction of what ‘value’ means at every turn. The tension between the ideals they hold as activists and the evidence and evaluations that Whitehall policymakers require and expect when considering widescale policy transformation is clearly mapped. Throughout the book Cook takes these testimonial nuggets to introduce key theoretical frameworks including Hacking's ‘looping’, ordinary ethics (Lambek and Das); communication praxis; anthropology of religion and medical anthropology, among others, to expertly explore her ethnographic data. In her concluding discussion, Cook addresses the mindfulness backlash which emerged in the late 2010s, foregrounding the ‘McMindfulness’ critique as counterpoint to the mindfulness mania of the previous year. McMindfulness suggests that mindfulness does not represent a great wellness awakening but rather an economically expedient, neoliberal tool, placing culpability for developing mental resilience on individual people, some of whom were severely unwell and therefore unable to take up this difficult mantel. Readers may be surprised that austerity and welfare reforms did not get a greater share of the book's analysis. Cook responds to this kind of provocation by carefully unpicking the ways that ‘McMindfulness’ does not actually fault mindfulness or its psychological underpinnings, but rather the instrumentalization of it, action which problematically conflates MBCT's ethical import with its economic value. Cook's writing is elegant and has a sense of humour. This supports what, ultimately, the reader is reminded of again and again: that institutions and bureaucracy are made of and by people. It is here that Cook's unique synthesis of her material shines most. As an anthropologist who engages regularly with policy and institutional communications, I suggest that perhaps Cook's most important contribution is that she reveals the humanity often lost in discussions of policy praxis, linking her work to discourses on, yes mental health, but also making an implicit call for diverse and inclusive knowledge-making towards the realization of making good lives.