Malignant sadness : the anatomy of depression

by L. Wolpert

Paper Book, 2006

Status

Available

Publication

London : Faber, 2006.

Description

Some years ago Lewis Wolpert had a severe depressive episode: despite a happy marriage and a successful scientific career, he could think only of suicide. When he eventually recovered, he became aware of the stigma attached to depression and of how difficult it was to get reliable information. So he undertook this written investigation into what science and psychiatry - and his own personal experience - could reveal about depression.

User reviews

LibraryThing member dianemb

This is a very good book on depression because it discusses the subject from two viewpoints. The author has suffered depression so can speak from experience, but as a doctor and researcher can also talk about it from a medical and scientific viewpoint. Different theories on the cause of depression

are discussed as well as various treatments. Also depression in other cultures other than western are presented.

Show Less

3 more

LibraryThing member meggyweg

This was easy to read and very informative—good for a layman, I think. I like how it coves depression in the non-Western world as well.

LibraryThing member heike6

This book was a great overview of all the different theories of causes of and treatments for depression, written by someone who has experienced the condition first hand. It is interesting to note that overall, psychotherapy and drug therapy have about the same success rate. There are viable

theories all over the place- but most likely it is some of everything.I learned that sometimes stressful events are never encoded in the conscious memory due to too much steroid being released which causes the hippocampus to fail to function properly, and anxiety can be left over in our implicit memory from these events. This is one reason a person can feel anxiety without knowing why.

Show Less

LibraryThing member isabelx

I saw a reference to this book in an Amazon review of another book on the same subject, and managed to borrow it from the library. It is a book on depression by an academic and scientist who became interested in the subject when he suffered a period of very bad depression himself. He made a

television series about depression a few years ago, which was very interesting too.

The title of the book comes from the author's belief that depression is sadness that has turned malignant (in the same way that cancer is cell division turned malignant). He discusses how depression affects the sufferer and how it manifests differently in different cultures, then looks at psychological and biological explanations for the disease. This is followed by a description of the various drugs and forms of psychotherapy available, and the surprising fact that they all seem to work about as well as each other.

Show Less

Fewer