Neurosis is passé, neurosis belongs to history, neurosis is dead.  So why am I writing this book?  The reason is that we need to be aware, even if we do not embrace, information that suggests the way we now look at common mental illness is not necessarily the most accurate or productive way of understanding, and more importantly, treating it. I also introduce this book with the foreword to its predecessor (Tyrer, 1989), written by the late Robert Kendell, and this also explains why I am publishing at this time. Robert, whom I will refer to as Bob from now on, was a stickler for accuracy and rarely wrote anything down that he could not defend with facts. His foreword was written 32 years ago but is just as apposite today – he actually could have written it today with the same wording, and this in itself reflects the poverty of attention that this subject has received since 1989. His statement ‘new concepts should not be adopted until they have been validated by long-term follow-up studies, and the patients with a fluctuating mélange of depressive, anxious and obsessional symptoms are so common that the term “general neurotic syndrome” must be retained to describe them’, is the keynote to this book.