Alternatives to standard drug treatments for this common problem. Medication doesn't always work for?or isn't always desired by?depression sufferers. This book provides therapists with concise and easy-to-implement strategies to keep their client's treatment medication-free. These include identifying repeating patterns, shifting their relationship to depression, imagining future possibilities, and restarting brain growth.
I won this book on Goodreads. Although I believe it was written for the clinician as someone who has suffered from chronic depression and anxiety I found it very interesting and useful. The book was well written and very easy to read and understand. It offered useful ideas such as recognizing one's depression and looking to the future to basically force oneself to interact with the world in spite of depression. Through physical, emotional and interpersonal activities there is hope that one can fight their way out of the darkness of depression.
I was pretty skeptical at first, but this turned out to be a decent book. Written more from the perspective of trying to help teach therapists how to help their clients, there is still plenty of value in reading it as a "client".
That said, this book could have used one more pass through from an editor. It definitely had the feel of a book that somebody ran through with spellcheck but didn't actually check to see if some of the phrases made sense. Not a ton, but enough to be distracting at times.
This book is written to be used if you yourself has depression or if you are in the clinical field treating depression. My mother in law got depressed over the winter and I picked this up to figure out what may have caused her blues. I convinced that her diet, lack of physical activity and social connections ( as the book discusses) were all strong contributing factors. It was an interesting read and I found the information on Abraham Lincolns depression(s) very enlightening.