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Summary: Great Overview of Cognitive Therapy for Depression
Review: This is an excellent book for anybody who struggles with depression. Fully explains cognitive therapy, how thinking determines emotions and therefore to manage emotions one needs to manage one's thinking. It can be done. Also recommend Depression is a Choice by A. B.Curtiss for more information on how depression works neuroscientifically and how to manage it with directed thinking.
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Summary: Read this book, which should be called: Life Can Be Better
Review: How much can we expect a book to change our life? Three years ago my therapist gave me an assignment to read Undoing Depression. He knew I was a hard case and would have never done so on my own. Since then I have begged dozens of friends [and students] to read it, often having a tough time because "What are you talking about? I'm not depressed." I tell them if reading for an hour doesn't produce something they can use in their lives, "I'll eat my hat."
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Summary: This book will help you
Review: When I bought this book, I told myself it was to help understand my mother better. But, I found that it was describing me! I read it cover to cover in two days. I just couldn't put it down. I am now on antidepressants and have never felt better. If you think you have depression, you need to read this book. It will definately help you.
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Summary: Read 'Feeling Good' Instead
Review: In reading O'Connor, I found striking similarities to the techniques found in 'Feeling Good'. O'Connor's work did little to help or inspire me. 'Feeling Good' is an upbeat, self-actualizing read. Skip this one and go directly there.
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Summary: One of the best of many
Review: I found this book to be absolutely useful in the providing the reader with tools for fighting the Beast, better known as Depression. The book is non judgmental, the author doesn't claim to know whether depression is a nature vs. nuture problem. He simply say's this is what it is, this is how depressed people think, and this is how you need to change that thinking. I personally love to read memoirs of people who have battled depression such as Undercurrents, and The Beast, as opposed to "how to" books about depression. However, this book stands out among the books out there claiming to be "self-help". If you are suffering with depression and want some help this is a great book to start with.
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Summary: One of the best books on depression
Review: Once in a while you come across a book on a very important subject that actually makes sense from the first page to the last page ... and this is one of these books. If you've suffered from depression or are currently depressed or perhaps depression by a loved one or a co-worker has affected you, then this book will help. How? Well, it shows that many depressive trends are based on thought patterns and the author analyses how depression develops and continues to hunt individuals throughout their lives. Then the author offers effective solutions how to avoid such trends and change traps that may lead to depression. Another book that I found extremely helpful and which also focuses on behavioral patterns as well as the roots of depression and solutions to avoid it and be healed from depression is Dietmar Scherf's I LOVE ME: Avoiding & Overcoming Depression.
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Summary: Life-saving advice for NYer's post-traumatic stress.
Review: A young member of our family has been afraid to go back to work and has been showing signs of depression as we found from information on the internet. Thankfully we found this book through the website of the same name. This week it has been passed around to seven people in our building and it would be more but some went out and got their own. Everything said in the earlier reviews is right on. But what is new is that there is help here for what we hope is only a temporary depression also.
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Summary: Brilliantly insightful book!
Review: Dr. O'Connor served for 14 years as executive director of the Northwest Center for Family Service and Mental Health, a private, nonprofit mental health clinic in Litchfield County, Connecticut, overseeing the work of twenty mental health professionals in treating almost a thousand patients per year. He is a practicing psychotherapist, with offices in Canaan, Connecticut, and New York City. ....In his biography on this site, he states that he believes "depression can never be fully grasped by mental health professionals who have not experienced it." In Dr. O'Connor's case, as a therapist, he has a unique and powerful perspective because he is the son of a depressive who committed suicide, has suffered depression himself, and applied the insights presented in his book in his own life to heal his depression.This book is very well-written, clear and accessible even when the doctor is talking about complex, professional issues in the mental health community. There is a thorough index and plentiful endnotes, as well as a very complete bibliography of recommended reading. The four sections of the book listed in the table of contents are: What We Know about Depression; Learning New Skills; Putting the Skills to Work; A New Synthesis. I believe this is one of the top books ever written on depression. If you only have time to read one book on the subject, I would heartily recommend you make it this one, because it is utterly brilliant. I personally believe that one of the most profound things a theorist can do is synthesize seemingly opposing or unlike ideas, pulling them together in a comprehensible whole, which is what Dr. O'Connor does so very, very well here. He has thoroughly surveyed the existing information on depression, made clear what we know and don't know about it, and what most often works, or doesn't work, to treat depression. In this regard, his discussion of why we don't have a comprehensive theory of depression at the present time is wonderful. Within this discussion he states: "The Freudian theory of human functioning has been on its last legs for some time, and we wait for a new theory, a new paradigm, to replace it….[A]lthough there is a wish to achieve a biochemical theory of human behavior, our current knowledge leaves us far from it; and if we had it, it would not answer our most interesting human questions." He covers the effects of trauma on depression and the biological basis of mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, manic depression and major depression and how this conception removes stigma. Then he asserts that though symptoms of mental illness are "biochemically mediated, that doesn't make [them inevitably] biochemically caused…." He is not anti-medication, but he states that medications can't tell us how to raise healthy children, make difficult decisions, or help us find meaning in life. He believes that "both nature and nurture play a part in the development of depression"--and in its cure. He states that "in depression, you use medication to help alleviate the pain and suffering, but the patient may still feel a lack of confidence, be painfully shy, lack assertive skills, have a distorted self-image…procrastinate…be stuck in a loveless marriage or a dead-end job. The patient must address these kinds of issues…or else he may suffer less but still not be part of life." It is this issue that the book addresses very thoroughly: how to engage in a deliberate skill-building program in conjunction with medication (or without it if you are one of the unlucky, sizeable percentage of depression sufferers diagnosed with "resistant depression" because antidepressants do not work for you). In his skill-building program, the author covers emotions, behavior, thinking, relationships, the self, and aids to recovery. He then discusses how to put these new skills to work on the job, in intimate relationships and in the community at large. An extremely thorough, comprehensive, invaluable guide!
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Summary: Great book
Review: Lots of insight about how to think about situations in a whole new light. Very different from every other book I've read on the subject (I'm a psych student) in the sense that it discusses various options on dealing with depression and doesn't make judgements on which treatment is better. I like how it seems to put the power of healing in the reader's hands.
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Summary: A Life Saver
Review: I am not even clear as to how I heard of this book, but I bought it within the hour and am now on my second reading. Keeping the journals has been of tremendous help, although at first they cause some discomfort. But as I continue them I am learning much about coping with depression,and where and how to go about recovering from it. I have been on medication for nine years with only marginal results. Now I am hopeful for the first time in forever that I might regain some of that VITALITY which depression has sapped from me.I haven't read FEELING GOOD, but I can't imagine it is is any better than this one. Thanks you Dr. OConnor
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