Mental Health and Growing Up: Factsheets for Parents, Teachers and Young People (4th edn) the Royal College of Psychiatrists' Child & Family Public Education Board RCPsych Publications, 2013, £20.00, pb, 152 pp. ISBN: 9781908020468

The fourth edition of Mental Health and Growing Up is one of those delightful revisions which seem to reassert its value in the same way a new publication would. For £20, the reader receives 46 factsheets which are crying out to be photocopied and distributed: 15 are designed with young people in mind, 31 are for carers and others working with young people.

The premise is the same as its previous incarnations - concise, readable factsheets covering a wide selection of mental health-related topics with references for further reading. However, the scope of subjects is much wider in this edition (the young peoples’ factsheets covered only 5 topics in the third edition) and new factsheets include ‘Exercise and mental health’, ‘Parental mental illness’ and the challengingly titled ‘Surviving adolescence’. The text has been updated and carefully reframed in places, and is slightly more formal and explanatory at times, but I suspect that young people in particular will find this helpful. The addition of case studies is a marked improvement and the fonts and layout give a ‘magazine’ feel which is appealing without being patronising.

One advantage the third edition held which has not been carried over is that the young peoples’ pages do not now have a great deal of hard data about how common particular problems are, which is often dwelt upon. There are some statistics in the factsheets for carers, however. Factsheets I was expecting to see but did not find were ‘youth pages’ on self-harm and on sex and relationships.

I can envisage the book being used in school PSHE lessons and Sure Start Centres as well as healthcare settings. The proviso is that many of the factsheets are available for free download on the College website and a quick web search finds sheets from the previous edition scattered even further throughout the internet. I suspect it will be easier for many people to print these off and hand them out than to photocopy. That said, it is a book which should be so well thumbed that its factsheets are falling out, and photocopied and distributed so many times that its pages are ever-warm.