Natural Health Service

A very interesting read for anyone wanting to get or stay healthy in a natural way. Sit back and enjoy.

Isabel Hardman has written a wonderful book about the benefits that the great outdoors can have for everyone's mental health.The author herself has suffered from PTSD and the consequences for her own mental health have been horrendous. However, she deliberately provides few details, so that her own troubles do not distract from her main aim which is to help others. Even so, I could not help feeling so sorry for her.As an experienced political journalist Isabel is well equipped to write this book and it came as no surprise to me to find that it was well researched and written in a style that is guaranteed to engage the reader.Studying and recording wild flowers, birdwatching, walking in the countryside, cycling, running and cold water swimming are just some of the activities described that can help improve your mental health, and Isabel has tried them all; so she speaks with authority.The author is clearly on a mission but this book has not been written for reasons of self promotion but in order to help others. Read it. Be helped.Thank you Isabel.

I found the content more anecdotal than I had anticipated, but was impressed by the author's attitude; and found the book consistently interesting (though a bit less so in the last chapter which is a bit less personal).The author has looked to a range of resources for help with her mental health issues: drugs, talking therapy and also - the subject of this book - the natural world, as sampled through immersion in gardening, bird-watching, running, cycling, wild swimming and ownership of a dog. This is quite impressive, as is the work to establish whether others too have found these activities helpful (I will, I'm sure, remember in particular the suggestion that dogs can help understand when people are feeling down; and the suggestions about the impact of wild swimming on the body).If I had hoped for more, I think it is just that it's disappointing that more scientific research on these subjects does not exist. What there is here, though, is consistently interesting - and food for thought for us all, as we consider how to keep ourselves in the best possible mental shape....

I absolutely love this book. I heard it as an audio book and thought I needed to get it so I could reference back to it. It is full of information about mental health and gardening and how gardening helps our mental health.I will be using this book many many times

I've long been a believer in the power of nature to boost our wellbeing and I notice a massive fall in my own mood and mental health if I don't spend a lot of time outdoors. I felt the book started off well but I personally didn't find much new information in here, although some parts were fascinating - such as the huge improvements in care home residents in the US when they were given to opportunity to incorporate more nature into their lives. I couldn't really warm to the author, either, and then when she revealed about halfway through she enjoyed writing for, and reading, the Sun, a paper that has done so much harm to so many people in so many ways, and has mocked those struggling with mental health issues on its front pages for cheap laughs, I was massively disappointed. I'm currently reading The Nature Fix by Florence Williams - it's excellent and kind of what I'd hoped this book was going to be.