Unholy Ghost
Unholy Ghost

Author: Nell Casey

Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks

Published: 2002-01-08

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 9780060007829

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Unholy Ghost is a unique collection of essays about depression that, in the spirit of William Styron's Darkness Visible, finds vivid expression for an elusive illness suffered by more than one in five Americans today. Unlike any other memoir of depression, however, Unholy Ghost includes many voices and depicts the most complete portrait of the illness. Lauren Slater eloquently describes her own perilous experience as a pregnant woman on antidepressant medication. Susanna Kaysen, writing for the first time about depression since Girl, Interrupted, criticizes herself and others for making too much of the illness. Larry McMurtry recounts the despair that descended after his quadruple bypass surgery. Meri Danquah describes the challenges of racism and depression. Ann Beattie sees melancholy as a consequence of her writing life. And Donald Hall lovingly remembers the "moody seesaw" of his relationship with his wife, Jane Kenyon. The collection also includes an illuminating series of companion pieces. Russell Banks's and Chase Twichell's essays represent husbandand-wife perspectives on depression; Rose Styron's contribution about her husband's struggle with melancholy is paired with an excerpt from William Styron's Darkness Visible; and the book's editor, Nell Casey, juxtaposes her own essay about seeing her sister through her depression with Maud Casey's account of this experience. These companion pieces portray the complicated bond -- a constant grasp for mutual understandingforged by depressives and their family members. With an introduction by Kay Redfield Jamison, Unholy Ghost allows the bewildering experience of depression to be adequately and beautifully rendered. The twenty-two stories that make up this book will offer solace and enlightenment to all readers.

Undoing Depression
Undoing Depression

Author: Richard O'Connor

Publisher: Little, Brown Spark

Published: 2021-09-28

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 0316266957

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The bestselling approachable guide that has inspired thousands of readers to manage or overcome depression — fully revised and updated for life in the 21st century. Depression rates around the world have skyrocketed in the 20‑plus years since Richard O'Connor first published his classic book on living with and overcoming depression. Nearly 40 million American adults suffer from the condition, which affects nearly every aspect of life, from relationships, to job performance, physical health, productivity, and, of course, overall happiness. And in an increasingly stressful and overwhelming world, it's more important than ever to understand the causes and effects of depression, and what we can do to overcome it. In this fully revised and updated edition — which includes updated information on the power of mindfulness, the relationship between depression and other diseases, the risks and side effects of medication, depression’s effect on thinking, and the benefits of exercise — Dr. O'Connor explains that, like heart disease and other physical conditions, depression is fueled by complex and interrelated factors: genetic, biochemical, environmental. But Dr. O'Connor focuses on an additional factor that is often overlooked: our own habits. Unwittingly we get good at depression. We learn how to hide it, and how to work around it. We may even achieve great things, but with constant struggle rather than satisfaction. Relying on these methods to make it through each day, we deprive ourselves of true recovery, of deep joy and healthy emotion. Undoing Depression teaches us how to replace depressive patterns with a new and more effective set of skills. We already know how to "do" depression—and we can learn how to undo it. With a truly holistic approach that synthesizes the best of the many schools of thought about this painful disease, and a critical eye toward medications, O'Connor offers new hope—and new life—for sufferers of depression.

Lincoln's Melancholy
Lincoln's Melancholy

Author: Joshua Wolf Shenk

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 2006-10-02

Total Pages: 538

ISBN-13: 054752689X

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A nuanced psychological portrait of Abraham Lincoln that finds his legendary political strengths rooted in his most personal struggles. Giving shape to the deep depression that pervaded Lincoln's adult life, Joshua Wolf Shenk’s Lincoln’s Melancholy reveals how this illness influenced both the President’s character and his leadership. Mired in personal suffering as a young man, Lincoln forged a hard path toward mental health. Shenk draws on seven years of research from historical record, interviews with Lincoln scholars, and contemporary research on depression to understand the nature of Lincoln’s unhappiness. In the process, Shenk discovers that the President’s coping strategies—among them, a rich sense of humor and a tendency toward quiet reflection—ultimately helped him to lead the nation through its greatest turmoil. A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice SELECTED AS A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Washington Post Book World, Atlanta Journal-Constituion, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette As Featured on the History Channel documentary Lincoln “Fresh, fascinating, provocative.”—Sanford D. Horwitt, San Francisco Chronicle “Some extremely beautiful prose and fine political rhetoric and leaves one feeling close to Lincoln, a considerable accomplishment.”—Andrew Solomon, New York Magazine “A profoundly human and psychologically important examination of the melancholy that so pervaded Lincoln's life.”—Kay Redfield Jamison, Ph.D., author of An Unquiet Mind

Love Works Like This
Love Works Like This

Author: Lauren Slater

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 175

ISBN-13: 9780747562177

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In this remarkable book, the author of "Welcome to My Country" and "Prozac Diary" writes about how people discover what love truly is and make the decision to open their life to a child.

The Noonday Demon
The Noonday Demon

Author: Andrew Solomon

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2014-09-16

Total Pages: 576

ISBN-13: 145161103X

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The author offers a look at depression in which he draws on his own battle with the illness and interviews with fellow sufferers, researchers, doctors, and others to assess the complexities of the disease, its causes and symptoms, and available therapies. This book examines depression in personal, cultural, and scientific terms. He confronts the challenge of defining the illness and describes the vast range of available medications, the efficacy of alternative treatments, and the impact the malady has on various demographic populations, around the world and throughout history. He also explores the thorny patch of moral and ethical questions posed by emerging biological explanations for mental illness. He takes readers on a journey into the most pervasive of family secrets and contributes to our understanding not only of mental illness but also of the human condition.

Black Dogs and Blue Words
Black Dogs and Blue Words

Author: Kimberly Emmons

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 0813547202

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Analyzes the rhetoric surrounding depression. Maintains that the techniques and language of depression marketing strategies, vague words such as worry, irritability, and loss of interest, target women and young girls and encourage self-diagnosis and self-medication. Further, depression narratives and other texts encode a series of gendered messages about health and illness. As depression and other forms of mental illness move from the medical-professional sphere into that of the consumer-public, the boundary at which distress becomes disease grows ever more encompassing, the need for remediation and treatment increasingly warranted. From publisher description.

Bipolar Faith
Bipolar Faith

Author: Monica A. Coleman

Publisher: Broadleaf Books

Published: 2022-02-08

Total Pages: 375

ISBN-13: 1506487106

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Overcome with mental anguish, Monica A. Coleman's great-grandfather had his two young sons pull the chair out from beneath him when he hanged himself. That noose remained tied to a rafter in the shed, where it hung above the heads of his eight children who played there for years to come. As it had for generations before her, a heaviness hung over Monica throughout her young life. As an adult, this rising star in the academy saw career successes often fueled by the modulated highs of undiagnosed Bipolar II Disorder, as she hid deep depression that even her doctors skimmed past in disbelief. Serendipitous encounters with Black intellectuals like Henry Louis Gates Jr., Angela Davis, and Renita Weems were countered by long nights of stark loneliness. Only as Coleman began to face her illness was she able to live honestly and faithfully in the world. And in the process, she discovered a new and liberating vision of God. Written in crackling prose, Monica's spiritual autobiography examines her long dance with trauma, depression, and the threat of death in light of the legacies of slavery, war, sharecropping, poverty, and alcoholism that masked her family history of mental illness for generations.

The Journals of Spalding Gray
The Journals of Spalding Gray

Author: Spalding Gray

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2011-10-18

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0307700526

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Riveting, funny, heartbreaking, at once raw and lyrical: these journals reveal the complexity of the actor/writer who invented the autobiographical monologue and perfected the form in such celebrated works as Swimming to Cambodia. Here is the first intimate portrait we have of the man behind the charismatic performer who ended his life in 2004: evolving artist, conflicted celebrity, a man struggling for years with depression before finally succumbing to its most desperate impulse. Begun when he was twenty-five, the journals give us Gray’s reflections on his childhood; his craving for success; the downtown New York arts scene of the 1970s; his love affairs, marriages and fatherhood; his travels in Europe and Asia; and throughout, his passion for the theater, where he worked to balance his compulsion to tell all with his terror of having his deepest secrets exposed. Culled from more than five thousand pages and including interviews with friends, colleagues, lovers, and family, The Journals of Spalding Gray gives us a haunting portrait of a creative genius who we thought had told us everything about himself—until now.

Depression
Depression

Author: Lee H. Coleman

Publisher: New Harbinger Publications

Published: 2012-05-03

Total Pages: 162

ISBN-13: 1608821986

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Depression is the most common mental health condition in the United States. In fact, up to one in five women and one in ten men will experience it in their lifetimes. Because it’s so prevalent, it’s sometimes called the common cold of psychiatric illnesses. Of course, this flip attitude is completely misguided. If you suffer from depression, then you know how debilitating it is, and how it can drastically affect your day-to-day life. If you’ve recently been diagnosed with depression, you probably have a few questions about the road to recovery that lies ahead. You might wonder what the best treatments are for your symptoms, how to tell if you’re making progress, and who, if anyone, you should tell about your diagnosis. In Depression: A Guide for the Newly Diagnosed, you’ll find which treatments are right for you and learn what you can expect from the recovery process. You will discover simple changes to your sleep and nutrition habits that can really make a difference and learn how to monitor your progress as you start feeling better so you can adjust treatment as needed. With this guide helping you along in your recovery, you can be among the millions of people who have come back from depression stronger, healthier, and happier than before. This book is a part of New Harbinger Publications' Guides for the Newly Diagnosed series.The series was created to help people who have recently been diagnosed with a mental health condition. Our goal is to offer user-friendly resources that provide answers to common questions readers may have after receiving a diagnosis, as well as evidence-based strategies to help them cope with and manage their condition, so that they can get back to living a more balanced life. Visit www.newharbinger.com for more books in this series.

Genre in a Changing World
Genre in a Changing World

Author: Charles Bazerman

Publisher: Parlor Press LLC

Published: 2009-09-16

Total Pages: 486

ISBN-13: 1643170015

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Genre studies and genre approaches to literacy instruction continue to develop in many regions and from a widening variety of approaches. Genre has provided a key to understanding the varying literacy cultures of regions, disciplines, professions, and educational settings. GENRE IN A CHANGING WORLD provides a wide-ranging sampler of the remarkable variety of current work. The twenty-four chapters in this volume, reflecting the work of scholars in Europe, Australasia, and North and South America, were selected from the over 400 presentations at SIGET IV (the Fourth International Symposium on Genre Studies) held on the campus of UNISUL in Tubarão, Santa Catarina, Brazil in August 2007—the largest gathering on genre to that date. The chapters also represent a wide variety of approaches, including rhetoric, Systemic Functional Linguistics, media and critical cultural studies, sociology, phenomenology, enunciation theory, the Geneva school of educational sequences, cognitive psychology, relevance theory, sociocultural psychology, activity theory, Gestalt psychology, and schema theory. Sections are devoted to theoretical issues, studies of genres in the professions, studies of genre and media, teaching and learning genre, and writing across the curriculum. The broad selection of material in this volume displays the full range of contemporary genre studies and sets the ground for a next generation of work.