Understanding Depression: A Complete Guide to Its Diagnosis and Treatment

By Donald F. Klein and Paul H. Wender

Book Overview

When Understanding Depression was first published over ten years ago, it quickly became a trusted guide for the millions of Americans suffering from depression. Now the long-awaited revised and expanded second edition of this definitive and readable book is available to a new generation of those struggling with depression and their families. Informed by up-to-date research on new drugs and treatments for biological depression, the authors again carefully illustrate the importance of accurately diagnosing the disease and using scientific data and tested research methods in treating it. The book provides the means of evaluating the benefits and disadvantages of both pharmaceutical and psychological treatment of depression and explores the different treatments available. The completely revised medication chapter covers both the old and the new antidepressants and SSRIs, as well as popular herbal supplements like St. John's Wort. It also focuses on the environmental and hereditary causes of biological depression, about which there are still many misconceptions, even among professionals. The authors include several self-rating tests which readers can use to determine the need to seek a psychological evaluation.
Using excerpts from patient histories to show their progress from the onset of depression to treatment to recovery, the authors put a human face on the specter of depression. Most of its victims fail to seek help, whether out of guilt or ignorance, and many are misdiagnosed by physicians or psychotherapists who fail to recognize the symptoms of the illness. Understanding Depression is an excellent source of support, providing a highly informed and readable guide to this much misunderstood disease.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195156137
• ISBN13: 9780195156133
• Release Date: April 2005
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 5.7" x 1.1" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

I do not hate, I am not alone, I am depressed

It was with initial fear that I read the book. However, as reading progressed I was able to identify with so many cases and situations.You see, no one would every imagen, not even I, that I was depressed. During work, and at home my responsibilities would require me to have a smile on my face, be positive, give great advice to others, be there for everyone.And yet, during those moments, my moments alone, I realized and would tell myself how unhappy I was, how much I did NOT LOVE ANYONE, not my husband, not my children, not even my ailing mother, who had a terminal illness. I couldn't be intimate and intense, everything was superficial, I felt all alone.Upon reading the book I realized that I was not an evil, cold person without feelings, I was in fact in some sort of depression. The book gave excellent advice on how to identify what stage I might be in.I read the book as many times as I need to review and remind myself that I can somehow overcome these feelings.I am not "cured", but the book has wonderful advise and guidance enabling me to identify where my feelings are coming from and how I can help myself.

DARKNESS INTELLIGIBLE

The handy book of Prof.Klein & Prof.Wender is readily comprehensible without lacking profundity and effectively assists a layperson with grasping the ominous and agonizing burden of depression darkening the lives of millions. The information it conveys is concise and relevant in any respect. In addition to the theoretical account of the depressive syndrome and its treatment the medical histories of several patients are vividly portrayed. Unfortunately there is one matter that affects my general contentment. The book should have a further subtitle: ...seen from a biologistic point of view! For the authors clearly go too far by claiming sole predominance of psychopharmacology over any kind of psychological psychotherapy (like cognitive or interpersonal therapy), whose practical value they are degrading to mere "comforting support" that "is not actually treating the underlying depression"(p.106). In a somewhat biased way they reduce the psycho-social impacts on the genesis of depression to secondary trigger-factors and deny them being genuine pathological causes. There can be no doubt that heredity plays an important role, but to treat the considerable moulding influence of nurture and socialisation on the individual person as marginal and minor remarks upon a purely neuro-physiological etiology of the insidious mood disease, focusing almost exclusively on genetic determination, is surely inadequate and exceeds the actual explanatory and therapeutic skills of bio-psychiatry at the end of the 20th-century. The book's sophistication notwithstanding, a bit more self-critical modesty and cooperative fairness against the so-called 'communicative therapies` and their verifiable usefulness would have redounded to the authors' scientific credit.