Editorial Review:Product Description:From a leading medical expert at Johns Hopkins, here is an up-to-the-minute, definitive guide to what s known about depression and how it can be treated.
Around ten percent of North Americans suffer from depression at some point -- and more than half haven t even sought help. Now, Dr. Raymond DePaulo, one of the world s foremost authorities on depression, provides a sensitive, thorough, and reassuring book for sufferers from depression and those who care about them. This practical guide for individuals with depression and their families -- the only totally comprehensive book in the market -- shows readers how to identify the problem, then directs them to the various forms of treatment, including medications, psychotherapy, support groups, and exercise. It is one of the few books to discuss in depth manic depression, the bipolar form of depression. Dr. DePaulo discusses both mainstream (the latest medications and talk therapies) and alternative paths and reveals the truth about the dangerous fallacies that abound about depression. Comprehensive, compassionate, and grounded in the very latest research into brain chemistry, psychology, and medications, this is a definitive, landmark roadmap to one of the most devastating -- and common -- mental illnesses.
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Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
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Brilliant Man
Excellent. This man is brilliant. After 12 years of depression he is the only doctor who correctly treated my daughter.
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A stepping off point
I have major depressive disorder. This book helped me understand the science of how the brain works with the various chemicals and drugs. As far as the experience or treatment, there wasn't much that I found personally relevant or didn't already know or that went into enough depth for me.
The book is a basic guide to understanding depression and does not offer any sort of cure or ideal treatment plan. That's not the point of it. The information is presented categorically and clearly with the resources cited, should you like to go further. The more common methods of treatment are presented with explanations of how they work and why.
However, this book was an excellent resource for the other people in my life who have been affected by my depression. They don't need or want to know all about the treatment options and experience in great depth. They do need to know some of the why's and how's and that it's not their fault. My parents found it to be quite helpful in understanding what was happening with me.
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A+ Book. Now there's a new therapy-Vagus Nerve Stimulation
This is an excellent book that I would highly recommend for anyone struggling with the depression. However, since publication of the marvelous book, the FDA has approved vagus nerve stimulation as a treatment for chronic depression. Vagus nerve stimulation is NOW the mainstream treatment for chronic or recurrent depression. Patients and their families should educate themselves about this remarkable treatment-it could change their life. I would recommend the book-"Out of the Black Hole: The Patient's Guide to Vagus Nerve Stimulation and Depression". It's a must read for anyone struggling with the grips of the terrible disease.
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A Biased View on Treating Depression
"Understanding Depression" is a clear and concise view of the illness through the eyes of "a psychiatrist who has seen in consultation, teaching, research, and treatment settings some 8,000 people with clinical depression and manic-depressive illness."
Dr. J. Raymond DePaulo Jr., M.D. is not only a psychiatrist, but also a psychiatry professor and the director of the Affective Mental Disorder Clinic at John Hopkins School of Medicine. Dr. DePaulo has written a cogent book at what it means to suffer from depression and its possible causes. The psychiatrist also covers various aspects of manic-depression, but the lion's share of the book covers the illness of depression. Despite numerous advances in medical science, we are still not clear on what causes depression. Dr. DePaulo states, "No one system, organ, or other factor is responsible for depression - not one steroid, not one gene, not one neurotransmitter, and not a lesion on one side of the brain or the other. What we seem to have is...a stew with lots of different and exotic ingredients."
Where the book becomes shortsighted is within the sections dealing with the treatment of depression. The doctor advocates the use of traditional and cutting-edge medication as the cure for the vast majority of people throughout the book. It is not surprising that a psychiatrist does not go in depth concerning alternatives to drug therapies, but Dr. DePaulo covers only an astonishing 9 pages regarding alternative treatments such as exercise, nutrition, or talk therapy. In fact, large portions of the text read like a long pharmaceutical advertisement.
In the end, "Understanding Depression" is an invaluable guide to just that, understanding depression. However, the latter part of the subtitle, "What You Can Do About It," is a biased view of a psychiatrist whose only remedy are pills despite this "cure" entailing ineffectiveness and serious side-effects for a significant portion of the recipients.
Bohdan Kot
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an Excellent Resource
If you're looking to learn about depression, this is an EXCELLENT book to begin with. DePaulo does a great job of explaining what depression is (and isn't) and what we do and don't know about it.
He explores the causes of depression and he's not afraid to say when something isn't 100% certain. The truth is, they're still learning so much about the causes of depression that I'm very suspicious of anyone who claims to know exactly what causes it or how best to treat it.
Also, the book reads well.. his writing style is very conversational. I would highly recommend this book for anyone who is trying to understand what depression is and the options one has in dealing with it.