Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn't Teach You and Medication Can't Give You

By Richard O'Connor

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0316043419
• ISBN13: 9780316043410
• Release Date: January 2010
• Publisher: Little Brown and Company
• Length: 374 Pages
• Weight: 0.97 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Positive

Haven’t finished it yet butttttt Does anyone so far a great book

One of the best books on depression

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.

A must-read for a depressive or his/her family

O'Connor is one of the best writers on depression I've read in 30 years as both a mental health professional and a sufferer. He weaves together research, theory, case examples and his own experience with depression in such a warm, down-to -earth way that reading this on depressed days, I am comforted that it really IS possible to undo depression. Self-help exercises are included. His main point -- that whatever "official" therapy we take in terms of counseling or medication, change is really about noticing our depressive thought and behavior patterns and working to change them, is what it's all really about in my experience. He acknowledges the pain and hard work in this -- again, one of the unique aspects of his writing is its warmth and tone of friendship and fellowship for the journey.