Kirkus Reviews QR Code
RECOVERY FROM DEPRESSION: A Self-Help Strategy by

RECOVERY FROM DEPRESSION: A Self-Help Strategy

By

Pub Date: May 27th, 1982
Publisher: Dutton

Some abstract--and largely useless--question-and-answer ruminations on taking charge of your own life, setting manageable goals, reducing pressure on yourself, etc. Kiev, author of Active Loving (1979) and proprietor of ""Life Strategy"" workshops, is quick to point out the folly of friends and relations who attempt to get you out of long-term depression by exhorting you to get moving. But despite a decent job of explaining the symptoms of clinical depression (which typically lasts, we're told, three to six months without medication), this slim volume does little more than exhort measured action itself. At first we're allowed to give into the impulse to stay in bed with the covers over our heads. But then we must: set up daily plans for accomplishment--to give us a sense of ""mastery"" and ""purpose""; examine the nature of our important relationships (e.g., are we playing the scapegoat role?); resist the impulse to react in anger to others' folly (something like the old count-to-ten routine); visualize all our ""negative"" feelings being locked away in an empty jar; and so forth. Even if you respond to this feel-your-way-approach to psychiatric disorder, it's been done in much more detail elsewhere. And Kiev's championship of trained psychiatric help, antidepressant medication, etc., only makes the book seem especially blithe and superficial.