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Helpful Books about Depression

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Depression is not simply a temporary change in mood or a sign of weakness. It is a real medical condition with many emotional, physical, behavioural and cognitive symptoms. Depression is a real health problem for which help is available. Some amazing books have been written about depression—from how-to-help advice books to autobiographies written by people battling the “black dog”.  If you're interested in the topic, these books are worth checking out.

22 results found

Unstuck

by: James S. Gordon M.D.
Unstuck
Despite the billions spent on prescription anti-depressant drugs and psychotherapy, people everywhere continue to grapple with depression. James Gordon, one of the nation’s most respected psychiatrists, now offers a practical and effective way to get unstuck. Drawing on forty years of pioneering work, Unstuck is Gordon’s seven-stage program for relief through food and nutritional supplements; Chinese medicine; movement, exercise, and dance; psychotherapy, meditation, and guided imagery; and spiritual practice. The result is a remarkable guide that puts the power to change in the hands of those ready to say “no” to suffering and drugs and “yes” to hope and happiness.

Depression Fallout

by: Anne Sheffield
release date: Apr 01, 2003
Depression Fallout
Using the vivid, poignant and personal stories of the members of a website support group she founded (www.depressionfallout.com), Anne Sheffield, the author of two highly acclaimed books on depression, provides an honest record of what happens to a love relationship once depression enters the picture, and offers solid advice on what the non–depressed partner can do to improve his or her own life and the relationship.Of the millions of people who suffer from a depressive illness, few suffer in solitude. They draw the people they love – spouses, parents, children, lovers, friends – into their illness. In her first book, How You Can Survive When They're Depressed, Anne Sheffield coined the phrase 'depression fallout' to describe the emotional toll on the depressive's family and close friends who are unaware of their own stressful reactions and needs. She outlined the five stages of depression fallout (confusion, self–doubt, demoralisation, anger, and the need to escape) and explained that these reactions are a natural result of living with a depressed person.

Overcoming Depression One Step at a Time

by: Michael Addis
release date: Oct 01, 2004
Overcoming Depression One Step at a Time

What if depression weren't a disorder occurring on its own but was rather a kind of signpost pointing at tangible things you needed to change in your life? This would radically alter not only the way you think about depression but also the strategies you'd use to overcome it.

Behavioral activation therapy is built on this powerful, insightful assumption. Its techniques offer fast, effective relief from depression by guiding you to make positive and rewarding changes in your life. This simple, profound process reconnects you to the naturally occurring rewards of a well-lived life, which are powerful antidotes to feelings of depression.

The workbook's engaging exercises create a structured framework in which you are encouraged to focus on those activities that will inspire you with feelings of pleasure, mastery, and engagement. Learn to develop a list of enjoyable activities or activities you need to engage in as a part of a normal and satisfying life. Begin with the easiest (or sometimes, the most indispensable) activities on your list, and learn how to tackle them one by one.

This book has been awarded The Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies Self-Help Seal of Merit — an award bestowed on outstanding self-help books that are consistent with cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) principles and that incorporate scientifically tested strategies for overcoming mental health difficulties. Used alone or in conjunction with therapy, our books offer powerful tools readers can use to jump-start changes in their lives.

Depression

by: Edward Welch
Depression
This book gives real hope to those who struggle with depression, and for the people who love them. Dr. Ed Welch writes compassionately on the complex nature of depression and sheds light on the path toward deep, lasting healing. Welch considers carefully the spiritual, medical, and emotional factors that contribute to depression. Even more important is his insight into the impact of these factors' interaction. If depression has touched your life in any way, you can be helped by this practical and far-reaching approach. - Back cover.

Self-Coaching

by: Joseph J. Luciani
release date: Jan 01, 2001
Self-Coaching
The simple, untold truth about anxiety and depression is that they are habits of insecurity--and, like all habits, they can be broken. In this new edition of the highly successful Self-Coaching, Dr. Joseph Luciani shows you how to change your way of thinking and develop a healthy, adaptive way of living through his proven Self-Talk strategy for coaching yourself back to health.

Talking to Depression

by: Claudia J. Strauss
release date: Jan 06, 2004
Talking to Depression
When someone suffers from depression, friends and family members naturally want to help—but too often their good intentions come out all wrong. This practical, compassionate guide helps readers understand exactly what their loved one is going through, and why certain approaches help and others have the potential to do damage. "**Talking to Depression**" offers specific advice on what to do and what not to do—and what to say and what not to say—to avoid frustration and give the kind of caring, effective support that will make a difference.

Undoing Depression

by: Richard O'Connor
release date: Jan 07, 2010
Undoing Depression
Like heart disease, says psychotherapist Richard O'Connor, depression is fueled by complex and interrelated factors: genetic, biochemical, environmental. In this refreshingly sensible book, O'Connor focuses on an additional factor often overlooked: our own habits. Unwittingly we get good at depression. We learn how to hide it, how to work around it. We may even achieve great things, but with constant struggle rather than satisfaction. Relying on these methods to make it through each day, we deprive ourselves of true recovery, of deep joy and healthy emotion. UNDOING DEPRESSION teaches us how to replace depressive patterns with a new and more effective set of skills. We already know how to "do" depression-and we can learn how to undo it. With a truly holistic approach that synthesizes the best of the many schools of thought about this painful disease, O'Connor offers new hope-and new life-for sufferers of depression.

The Cognitive Behavioral Workbook for Depression

by: William J. Knaus EdD
release date: Jun 01, 2012
The Cognitive Behavioral Workbook for Depression
"The Cognitive Behavioral Workbook for Depression offers a complete program for defeating depressive thinking and other symptoms of depression using cognitive behavioral therapy, a proven effective treatment protocol. This new edition includes new information on relapse prevention, revised worksheets and exercises, and vital information on depression coexisting with other mental health conditions. The entire workbook has been thoroughly updated with the latest depression research. First, readers learn the basics for defeating the most damaging symptoms of depression and create a master plan for overcoming their condition. Later, readers discover the roots of their depression in depressive beliefs, worthlessness beliefs, and helplessness beliefs. The final section of this workbook helps readers anchor these positive changes for long-term relapse prevention and increased motivation. Recommended by therapists nationwide, this second edition of The Cognitive Behavioral Workbook for Depression offers all the skills readers need to overcome depression with cognitive behavioral therapy"-- "This revised new edition of The Cognitive Behavioral Workbook for Depression draws on the most current evidence-based and empirically supported techniques from cognitive therapy and rational emotive behavior therapy for defeating the symptoms of depression"--

A Long Way Down

by: Nick Hornby
A Long Way Down
Meet Martin, JJ, Jess, and Maureen. Four people who come together on New Year's Eve: a former TV talk show host, a musician, a teenage girl, and a mother. Three are British, one is American. They encounter one another on the roof of Topper's House, a London destination famous as the last stop for those ready to end their lives. In four distinct and riveting first-person voices, Nick Hornby tells a story of four individuals confronting the limits of choice, circumstance, and their own mortality. This is a tale of connections made and missed, punishing regrets, and the grace of second chances.

More Than Moody

by: Harold Koplewicz
More Than Moody
One of the nation's most distinguished child and adolescent psychiatrists shows parents the warning signs, risk factors, and key symptoms that offer important clues about depression. He also illustrates a broad range of treatment options including SSRI antidepressants as well as non-pharmaceutical approaches such as cognitive behavior therapy. With solid advice and compelling real-life stories, More Than Moody is an invaluable resource.

The Mindful Way through Depression

by: Jon Kabat-Zinn
The Mindful Way through Depression
The revolutionary book that has helped hundreds of thousands of readers find relief from chronic unhappiness is now in a revised and updated second edition. This authoritative, easy-to-use self-help program is grounded in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, a clinically proven approach. The expert authors explain why our usual attempts to "fix" sadness or "just stop thinking about it" can actually worsen depression, instead of relieving it. Through vivid stories and downloadable audio meditations encouragingly narrated by Jon Kabat-Zinn, the book shows how you can break the mental habits that lead to despair--and recover a sense of joy, aliveness, and possibility. Revised throughout to be even more reader friendly, the second edition features fresh insights on coping with the challenges of our ever-changing world, the latest scientific data, and four additional audio tracks. See also the authors' Mindful Way Workbook, which provides step-by-step guidance for building your mindfulness practice in 8 weeks. Plus, mental health professionals, see also the authors' bestselling therapy guide: Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression, Second Edition.

The Black Veil

by: Rick Moody
The Black Veil
"While still in his twenties, Rick Moody found that a decade of alcohol, drugs, and other indulgences had left him stranded in a depression so severe that he feared for his life. The road of excess led, for him, not to the palace of wisdom but rather to a psychiatric hospital in one of New York's least exalted boroughs.". "The Back Veil is Rick Moody's account of that debilitating passage in his life. It is the story of a mind unraveling, and of how it feels when the underpinnings of life fall away. The anxieties of early adulthood, of first finding a place in the world - the weight placed upon that first relationship, first job, first apartment - are presented here with enormous sympathy. Anyone who has ever felt his or her own psychological footing slip, even briefly, will find Moody's account of his breakdown and return both harrowing and heartbreaking."--BOOK JACKET.

Unholy Ghost

by: Nell Casey
Unholy Ghost

Unholy Ghost is a unique collection of essays about depression that, in the spirit of William Styron's Darkness Visible, finds vivid expression for an elusive illness suffered by more than one in five Americans today. Unlike any other memoir of depression, however, Unholy Ghost includes many voices and depicts the most complete portrait of the illness. Lauren Slater eloquently describes her own perilous experience as a pregnant woman on antidepressant medication. Susanna Kaysen, writing for the first time about depression since Girl, Interrupted, criticizes herself and others for making too much of the illness. Larry McMurtry recounts the despair that descended after his quadruple bypass surgery. Meri Danquah describes the challenges of racism and depression. Ann Beattie sees melancholy as a consequence of her writing life. And Donald Hall lovingly remembers the "moody seesaw" of his relationship with his wife, Jane Kenyon.

The collection also includes an illuminating series of companion pieces. Russell Banks's and Chase Twichell's essays represent husbandand-wife perspectives on depression; Rose Styron's contribution about her husband's struggle with melancholy is paired with an excerpt from William Styron's Darkness Visible; and the book's editor, Nell Casey, juxtaposes her own essay about seeing her sister through her depression with Maud Casey's account of this experience. These companion pieces portray the complicated bond -- a constant grasp for mutual understandingforged by depressives and their family members.

With an introduction by Kay Redfield Jamison, Unholy Ghost allows the bewildering experience of depression to be adequately and beautifully rendered. The twenty-two stories that make up this book will offer solace and enlightenment to all readers.

What to Do When Someone You Love Is Depressed, Second Edition

by: Susan K. Golant
What to Do When Someone You Love Is Depressed, Second Edition

A clinical psychologist and expert on depression updates the book that has helped thousands with its combination of professional advice and comfort

There are few circumstances in life as hard and at the same time as important as being a friend to a person who is suffering from depression. What to Do When Someone You Love Is Depressed offers guidance to the friends and family of a depressed person on how to keep one's own spirits up and at the same time do what is best to help a loved one get through a difficult time. Among the many subjects addressed are
• the warning signs of serious illness
• how to maintain intimacy and communication
• the most successful forms of treatment
• what to do when someone threatens suicide
This updated edition addresses readers' questions and provides new and expanded information on
• how to choose the right psychiatrist
• the role and limits of medication
• resistant depression
• the link between depression and chronic illness
• specific challenging situations and advice on handling them

The Bell Jar

by: Sylvia Plath
The Bell Jar
A Special Hardcover Edition to Commemorate the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Publication of Sylvia Plath's Remarkable Novel Sylvia Plath's shocking, realistic, and intensely emotional novel about a woman falling into the grip of insanity Esther Greenwood is brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under—maybe for the last time. In her acclaimed and enduring masterwork, Sylvia Plath brilliantly draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that her insanity becomes palpably real, even rational—as accessible an experience as going to the movies. A deep penetration into the darkest and most harrowing corners of the human psyche, The Bell Jar is an extraordinary accomplishment and a haunting American classic.

Girl, Interrupted

by: Susanna Kaysen
Girl, Interrupted
In 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist she'd never seen before, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen was put in a taxi and sent to McLean Hospital. She spent most of the next two years on the ward for teenage girls in a psychiatric hospital as renowned for its famous clientele--Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor, and Ray Charles--as for its progressive methods of treating those who could afford its sanctuary. Kaysen's memoir encompasses horror and razor-edged perception while providing vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers. It is a brilliant evocation of a "parallel universe" set within the kaleidoscopically shifting landscape of the late sixties. Girl, Interrupted is a clear-sighted, unflinching document that gives lasting and specific dimension to our definitions of sane and insane, mental illness and recovery.

Prozac Nation

by: Elizabeth Wurtzel
release date: Jan 01, 2000
Prozac Nation
"A book that became a cultural touchstone." -- The New Yorker

Elizabeth Wurtzel writes with her finger in the faint pulse of an overdiagnosed generation whose ruling icons are Kurt Cobain, Xanax, and pierced tongues. In this famous memoir of her bouts with depression and skirmishes with drugs, Prozac Nation is a witty and sharp account of the psychopharmacology of an era for readers of Girl, Interrupted and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar.

 

A Fan's Notes

by: Frederick Exley
release date: Aug 12, 1988
A Fan's Notes
This fictional memoir, the first of an autobiographical trilogy, traces a self professed failure's nightmarish decent into the underside of American life and his resurrection to the wisdom that emerges from despair.

The Noonday Demon

by: Andrew Solomon
The Noonday Demon
The Noonday Demon examines depression in personal, cultural, and scientific terms. Drawing on his own struggles with the illness and interviews with fellow sufferers, doctors and scientists, policy makers and politicians, drug designers, and philosophers, Andrew Solomon reveals the subtle complexities and sheer agony of the disease as well as the reasons for hope. He confronts the challenge of defining the illness and describes the vast range of available medications and treatments, and the impact the malady has on various demographic populations—around the world and throughout history. He also explores the thorny patch of moral and ethical questions posed by biological explanations for mental illness. With uncommon humanity, candor, wit and erudition, award-winning author Solomon takes readers on a journey of incomparable range and resonance into the most pervasive of family secrets. His contribution to our understanding not only of mental illness but also of the human condition is truly stunning.

Listening to Prozac

by: Peter D. Kramer
Listening to Prozac
Kramer examines the implications of taking drugs to alter personality rather than effect illness, focusing on Prozac, a popular antidepressant.

Darkness Visible

by: William Styron
Darkness Visible
In the summer of **1985**, severe depression left **William Styron** hopeless and suicidal. His memoir centers on his hospitalization and subsequent road to recovery. **Styron**’s message reminds us that ***as bleak as it may seem, there’s always a light at the end of the tunnel.*** Regardless of your experience, **Styron** will stir up strong emotions. Darkness Visible provides deep insight into what it’s like to live with depression—insight that will resonate with survivors and help those who aren’t afflicted develop a greater understanding of the pain that depression sufferers are going through. **Styron**’s utter candor makes this book truly impactful.
Categories: Nonfiction / Memoir, Nonfiction / Psychology, Nonfiction / Mental Health

Telling Yourself the Truth

by: Marie Chapian
release date: Feb 01, 2000
Telling Yourself the Truth
Most of What Happens in Your Life Happens Because of the Way You Think. Wrong thinking produces wrong emotions, wrong reactions, wrong behavior--and unhappiness! Learning to deal with your thoughts is the first step on the road to healthy thinking. How to handle one's thoughts properly is what this book is all about! It explains the life-changing method the authors call Misbelief Therapy, and it can work for you-- In your home In your own circumstances In your own problems In your own adverse environment In your own thinking Based on the Bible, this book has helped thousands of people for many years, and it can help you! Telling Yourself the Truth can show you how to identify your own misbeliefs and replace them with the truth. Also available: the corresponding Telling Yourself the Truth study guide. Winner of the Gold Book Award (500,000 copies sold), Winner of the Gold Medallion Award (ECPA), which recognizes excellence in evangelical Christian literature
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