When you feel depressed, suffering from a deep sadness, do you feel powerless over your mood? Does your life feel unmanageable because of it? Does your preoccupation with past hurts and regrets interfere with your life? Do you feel hopeless about finding a cure for your depression? If you answer "yes" to these questions, you may be addicted to your mood. It acts like a drug that sedates, numbs, and possesses you, causing you to sleepwalk through life. Viewing your depressed mood as an addiction, Dr. Ortman guides you through the time-tested Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous to find healing and growth. He shows how the Steps offer practical wisdom to awaken your spirit deadened by your depression. The Steps provide guidance for your personal journey into the darkness of your mood so that you can discover your true self and release the Power within you.
This is the REVISED 174 page inspiring "Big Book" of the 12 step fellowship of Depressed Anonymous. This innovative and workable approach provides a practical step by step plan for recovery from depression. The book provides over 30 testimonials of those persons who have successfully defeated their depression by being part of the fellowship and following the plan as outlined in this innovative approach to overcoming depression. The book, in it's 3rd edition, is written by those who WERE depressed--they've been there and now they want to share with others, who like themselves, can hope and get well. Want to start a Depressed Anonymous group? This is the book for getting started! Contains the "how to's" for group formation and sample meeting format.
Depression: The Way Out of Your Prison gives us a way of understanding our depression which matches our experience and which enables us to take charge of our life and change it. Dorothy Rowe shows us that depression is not an illness or a mental disorder but a defence against pain and fear, which we can use whenever we suffer a disaster and discover that our life is not what we thought it was. Depression is an unwanted consequence of how we see ourselves and the world. By understanding how we have interpreted events in our life we can choose to change our interpretations and thus create for ourselves a happier, more fulfilling life. Depression: The Way Out of Your Prison is for depressed people, their family and friends, and for all professionals and non-professionals who work with depressed people.
In this no-nonsense guide for men, psychologist Jonas Horwitz presents straightforward, jargon-free strategies to help you identify and overcome depression, once and for all. The damned thing about severe depression is that it takes over your brain, body, and spirit. It wants you to say to yourself, "There is nothing I can do to make myself feel better. I am helpless in the face of my problems." Even at this very moment your severe depression is whispering in your ear, "This is all bulls@#t." Your depression has lived with you for a long time, and has seldom left your side. It's relentlessly pessimistic, and wants you to believe that your misery will never end. These are the lies your depression is wanting you believe. With this unique guide, you'll learn why it's so important to take your severe depression seriously—just as you would if you had cancer, heart disease, diabetes, or any other life-threatening illness. In addition, by viewing your depression as a separate entity—The Beast—you'll discover how it tries to trick you when you are most stressed to do things that leave you feeling much more depressed. You'll also learn how changing your behavior can actually change your brain chemistry. And, most importantly, you'll find actionable solutions to put The Beast in its place so you can start feeling better now! In order to overcome your depression, you must understand its nature. This book will help you understand The Beast, stop feeding it, and take back your life.
A clinical psychologist and expert on depression updates the book that has helped thousands with its combination of professional advice and comfort There are few circumstances in life as hard and at the same time as important as being a friend to a person who is suffering from depression. What to Do When Someone You Love Is Depressed offers guidance to the friends and family of a depressed person on how to keep one's own spirits up and at the same time do what is best to help a loved one get through a difficult time. Among the many subjects addressed are • the warning signs of serious illness • how to maintain intimacy and communication • the most successful forms of treatment • what to do when someone threatens suicide This updated edition addresses readers' questions and provides new and expanded information on • how to choose the right psychiatrist • the role and limits of medication • resistant depression • the link between depression and chronic illness • specific challenging situations and advice on handling them
8 1/2" x 11" soft cover. Anyone wanting to bear down on their depression and find a way out of the darkness--this DA Workbook turns a light on for that person willing to work! This Workbook serves as an important companion volume to the "Big Book" of the fellowship, namely DEPRESSED ANONYMOUS. The Workbook provides an in-depth approach to working each of the 12 steps--one at a time. This Workbook, besides being an individual project is also used in group discussions. Each quote in the Workbook is referenced to a source in the "Big Book."
There are hundreds of books that will try to help you ''overcome'' or ''put an end to'' depression. But what if you could use your depression to change your life for the better? Your symptoms may be signals that something in your life needs to change. Learning to understand and interpret these signals is much more important than ignoring or avoiding them - approaches that only make the situation worse. This workbook uses techniques from acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) to offer a new treatment plan for depression that will help you live a productive life by accepting your feelings instead of fruitlessly trying to avoid them. The Mindfulness & Acceptance Workbook for Depression will show you, step-by-step, how to stop this cycle, feel more energized, and involve yourself in pleasurable and fulfilling activities that will help you work through, rather than avoid, aspects of your life that are depressing you. Use the techniques in this book to evaluate your own depression and create a personalized treatment plan. You'll enrich your total life experience by focusing your energy not on fighting depression, but on living the life you want.
A 75th anniversary e-book version of the most important and practical self-help book ever written, Alcoholics Anonymous. Here is a special deluxe edition of a book that has changed millions of lives and launched the modern recovery movement: Alcoholics Anonymous. This edition not only reproduces the original 1939 text of Alcoholics Anonymous, but as a special bonus features the complete 1941 Saturday Evening Post article “Alcoholics Anonymous” by journalist Jack Alexander, which, at the time, did as much as the book itself to introduce millions of seekers to AA’s program. Alcoholics Anonymous has touched and transformed myriad lives, and finally appears in a volume that honors its posterity and impact.
Dep-Anon is a support group for family and friends of the depressed. This program is very much like Al-Anon where family members and friends can gather to help each other learn about the nature of depression. The motive for starting a group for family and friends of the depressed is to ensure that those most affected by the depression of a loved one learn from each other the best ways to care for themselves. In a way, the 12 step program of recovery is much like Al-Anon in that family and friends of the alcoholic take care of themselves while keeping the focus on their own lives and not on the behavior of the alcoholic. One important thing that the family members learn from the Dep-Anon Family Group is that they are no longer alone. I learn to take responsibility for my own life.Dep-ANon helps us to share our experiences, strengths, and hope with our fellowship family. Depressed Anonymous and Dep-Anon are two sides of the same coin: In Depressed Anonymous, the depressed seek help and find it for themselves in their fellowship. In Dep-Anon the family finds help for themselves in their group fellowship. In both of these fellowships, the keystone for recovery are the 12spiritual principles of recovery. Both groups embark on a journey of mutual support while incorporating the spiritual principles in every aspect of their daily lives.
“A cleareyed, insightful account of how she felt during her nosedives into despair . . . shot through with a self-awareness that helps readers cheer her on.”—The New York Times A New York Times Book Review Favorite Read of the Year “Despair is always described as dull,” writes Daphne Merkin, “when the truth is that despair has a light all its own, a lunar glow, the color of mottled silver.” This Close to Happy—Merkin’s rare, vividly personal account of what it feels like to suffer from clinical depression—captures this strange light. Merkin has been hospitalized three times: first, in grade school, for childhood depression; years later, after her daughter was born, for severe postpartum depression; and later still, after her mother died, for obsessive suicidal thinking. Recounting this series of hospitalizations, as well as her visits to myriad therapists and psychopharmacologists, Merkin portrays the lifelong arc of her affliction, beginning in a childhood largely bereft of love and stretching into the present, where she lives a high-functioning life and her depression is manageable, if not “cured.” The opposite of depression, she writes with characteristic insight, is not a state of unimaginable happiness, but a state of relative all-right-ness. In this dark yet vital memoir, Merkin describes not only the harrowing sorrow that she has known all her life, but also her early, redemptive love of reading and gradual emergence as a writer. Written with an acute understanding of the ways in which her condition has evolved as well as affected those around her, This Close to Happy is an utterly candid coming-to-terms with an illness that is still often stigmatized and shrouded in misunderstanding. “[A] mesmerizing memoir.” —Booklist (starred review) “Brings a stunningly perceptive voice to the forefront of the conversation about depression, one that is both reassuring and revelatory.” —Carol Gilligan, author of In a Different Voice
