Understanding Mental Health: a critical realist perspective steers a middle way between psychiatric positivism and the nihilism of the recent French poststructuralist tradition. It relies on the guidance of neither psychiatry nor social science (with the discipline of psychology being an ambivalent participant in both camps), though all of this range of disciplinary knowledge provides my subject matter. Instead, the guidance comes from philosophy, one of Foucault's three legs on the milking stool of human science, but from one of his critics, Roy Bhaskar. He and others in his wake have offered us an escape route from the cul-de-sac options of naive realism and unending postmodern scepticism.