Between
Stories
Mental Health, a Shifting Landscape, and Imagining What Comes Next
Mental Health, a Shifting Landscape, and Imagining What Comes Next
I — The premise
The field you trained for is becoming something new — faster than any of us were prepared for. Most clinicians can feel it. Very few have been handed language for it. This book is that language.
Between Stories offers a lens, not a program: everything we call reality runs on stories — about progress, about what healing is, about what a career is, about who you are — and several of those stories are shifting at once.
Once you can see a story as a story, everything changes. It can be examined, grieved when it needs to be, set down, or consciously chosen. The disorientation you've been feeling stops reading as personal failure and starts reading as what it actually is: accurate perception — and the beginning of something, not the end.
Across seven chapters, punctuated by satirical clinical instruments your professional ear is already tuned for, the book moves from recognition toward imagination — the real intelligence of this moment — and the small, concrete, genuinely hopeful work of building what comes next.
People have crossed times like this before. They found their way to new stories. So will we.
II — What's inside
III — A passage
You probably know the Greek word chronos. It is the root of chronological. Clock time. The hour after this one. The Tuesday after Monday. The calendar that runs whether you are paying attention to it or not.
The Greeks had another word for time.
The word is kairos.
Kairos is not clock time. Kairos is the right time. The threshold time. The moment when something must be perceived, or acted on, or recognized — and the moment is structured such that the perception belongs to this moment and to no other.
A chronos question is what time is it.
— from Chapter Five, The Liminal Space
A kairos question is what time am I in.
IV — Plainly