Well-organized and replete with examples and exercises; a highly usable aid for those with depression and for concerned...
A psychologist offers practical, down-to-earth self-help advice for victims of depression and their families.
Stone (How to Think Theologically, 2013, etc.), a practicing marriage and family therapist, writes in this eminently readable book that self-help “is exactly what’s needed to manage and defeat depression.” While he doesn’t advocate avoiding professional help, Stone offers numerous strategies and techniques enabling those with depression to take immediate, substantive action to solve their own problems. The authoritative, comprehensive guide begins with an overview of depression in a section that aims to remove the stigma of depression and help sufferers embrace a future of hope. The bulk of the book details the “four faces” of depression: physiological, cognitive, behavioral and interpersonal, or as Stone puts it more simply, “body, thoughts, actions, and relationships.” The author devotes several chapters to each of the four areas and includes specific examples of people who overcame depression. In the chapters concerning the cognitive area, he discusses errors in thinking that accentuate depression as well as ways to change negative thinking, control obsessive thoughts, create hopeful conversation, reassign blame, deal with guilt and confront the inner critic. In a particularly interesting exercise, Stone recommends creating a depression flowchart. “The depression flowchart,” he writes, “simply reverses the order of the flowchart for assembling a piece of furniture: you learn how you get depressed and therefore what not to do. Now you can design an alternative way of responding to life’s frustrations and uncertainties.” A final part of the book provides specific resources to help with depression, including suicide prevention strategies and ways to seek out and evaluate professional help. At the end of every chapter, Stone appends two very helpful sections, “Take Action” and “For the Family,” each containing specific steps an individual and family can take to most effectively apply the chapter’s content to their own situations. Also helpful are appendices that include a “self-rating depression scale” and suggested readings and references.
Well-organized and replete with examples and exercises; a highly usable aid for those with depression and for concerned families and friends who want to offer meaningful guidance.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500739751
Page Count: 257
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
