The author is clearly dedicated to her area of expertise, although I feel she could have discussed issues such as organ donation which would have tied in nicely with the subject. I thought as well as using CBT at times, that she was also using a solution focused therapeutic approach most of the time.

But ultimately I have to judge With the End in Mind as a book that Mannix has written, separating it from Mannix's personal achievements, and in this context, it fell very short.

The final of these inevitable events will happen to every single person on this planet at some point in the future.

Jaunty, boisterous and unsentimental, Doughty believes that we in the west have made death and its aftermath into a corporate, perfunctory affair, in which the meaning of an ending is denied. With meditations on life, death, and the space between them, With the End in Mind describes the possibility of meeting death gently, with forethought and preparation, and shows the unexpected beauty, dignity, and profound humanity of life coming to an end. I like her approach to her patients and families, and wish she could be my doctor when the time comes. So the good doctor, when explaining the nature of a disease and the possible treatments, should be quite explicit about the details and what the patient and the carers are likely to face. Her mission is to “reclaim public understanding of dying” and to bring individuality and joy back into our dealings with the dead – and so, in From Here to Eternity, she embarks on a journey of discovery: to the only open pyre in America; to a sky burial in Tibet, where the body breaker slices the corpse into parts, pounds the flesh with a mallet, mixes it with barley flour and yak butter or milk, and leaves it to the shrieking vultures to consume; to burial towers in India; to the people of Tana Toraja in Indonesia, where mummified bodies are cared for in their home (offered food, dressed, even given a bed with the living) over months or years until the family can sacrifice an animal and put the dead to their final rest; to Barcelona’s mass bone pits; Mexico’s Day of the Dead.

If you are wired so that you think there's grandeur, learning, redemption, or whatever other "quality" in suffering except pointless pain, you are going to stand your ground and use this book to reinforce your rationalizations about why the pain (physical suffering) is unavoidable, even necessary part of human experience. She has a particular interest in combining CBT with palliative care to help the dying approach their remaining time with realism rather than pessimism.

Illuminating and beautiful … I shed a few tears but it’s not gut wrenching and Mannix weaves the light and dark strands of her experience with finesse. The narratives feel generic; the people often feel generic, as though all their idiosyncrasies have been sanded down or air-brushed out. Having qualified as a Cognitive Behaviour Therapist in 1993, she started the UK’s (possibly the world’s) first CBT clinic exclusively for palliative care patients, and devised ‘CBT First Aid’ training to enable palliative care colleagues to add new skills to their repertoire for helping patients.There are lots of moving stories in here, extremely well written - and I'm sure that this doctor has done a lot of good things. In addition to being an engaging and, dare I say, heartwarming read, it is also richly filled with lessons and advice for current or future use. The book is unique in giving a doctor’s perspective but telling the stories of patients and their families, so we see a whole range of emotions and attitudes: denial, anger, regret, fear and so on. It also ignores the significant number of individuals who are either rich enough to travel from the UK to Switzerland or not so rich but just as desperate - and so who throw themselves down stairs / try to poison / or suffocate themselves - all alone since they are concerned for their family with the current law. By turns touching and tragic, funny and wise, With the End in Mind brings together Kathryn Mannix ’ s lifetime of medical experience to tell powerful stories of life and death.