Say goodbye to dreary shades of black and white and start seeing the world for the prism of color it is with this refreshing and creative guide! In a unique combination of art, activities, and uplifting anecdotes, 21 Ways to a Happier Depression leads you on a hands-on journey to personal growth. Getting you out of one of "those moods" can be as simple as: ? Making the bed ? Nurturing a plant ? Painting shapes in loops and colors ? Breaking down your work into a to-do list ? Getting a fresh new look with some different décor, or even a haircut! Inspired by his own life experience, Dr. Seth Swirsky gently encourages positive introspection through honest and practical advice. With this book, a happier depression is literally in your hands!

It’s not just big choices that can radically change our lives—sometimes it’s the small ones. Activating Happiness offers powerful, evidence-based strategies to help you conquer low motivation, nix negative moods, and defeat depression by actively making positive choices in small, everyday moments. If you have depression or just suffer from low mood and lack of motivation, you know that your life isn’t going to change with one grand, sweeping gesture. But you can make important decisions every day—whether it’s getting off the couch and going for a walk, signing up for a course in pottery or screenwriting, or just setting aside some time to meet and chat with a good friend over coffee. These little things won’t change your life all at once. But over time, they will shape the way you live and see the world and keep you on a path to wellness. In Activating Happiness, you’ll find solid strategies based in behavioral activation and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) to help you break the cycle of avoidance, guilt, shame, and hopelessness that can take hold when you’re feeling your lowest. Using this guide, you’ll find little, doable ways to “show up

The best-selling author of Listening to Prozac examines depression from a historical and scientific perspective, challenging cultural beliefs that depression is a noble or romantic disorder linked to soulful or creative achievements, and calling for a greater awareness of depression's devastating impact, as well as renewed efforts to provide curative treatments. Reprint. 75,000 first printing.

A scholar and authority on the relationship between literature and psychology looks at the American quest for happiness and rejection of melancholy and argues that melancholia is actually essential to a thriving culture, the underlying impetus for creative thinking, and the muse of great art, music, literature, and innovation.

Even as a reporter, Sheila Hamilton missed the signs as her husband David’s mental illness unfolded before her. By the time she had pieced together the puzzle, it was too late. Her once brilliant, intense, and passionate partner was dead within six weeks of a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, leaving his nine-year-old daughter and wife without so much as a note to explain his actions, a plan to help them recover from their profound grief, or a solution for the hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt that they would inherit from him. All the Things We Never Knew takes readers from David and Sheila’s romance through the last three months of their life together and into the year after his death. It details their unsettling descent from ordinary life into the world of mental illness, and examines the fragile line between reality and madness. Now, a decade after David’s death, Sheila and her daughter, Sophie, have learned the power of choosing life over retreat; let themselves love and trust again; and understand the importance of forgiveness. Their story will resonate with all those who have loved

Three generations of women. For each, the chaos of what has come before brings with it a painful legacy. "I have Stayed. I have Stayed - I have Stayed for as long as I possibly can."

Presents information on how to uncover the cause of anxiety and depression and find relief from symptoms and feel better.

Anxiety, Depression, and other mental afflictions are regretfully shunned by a society that favors winners. Losers are discarded or left to their own devices in most cases, like I was. This book is an inside, non-medical, non-scientific look inside the brain and life of a person whose life has been dominated by anxiety with a good measure of depression thrown in. It is a summary of methods that the author has employed to fight an invisible lifelong foe, the way the methods were discovered, and their effect. The objective is to provide the sufferer with the feeling that they are not alone, that there is someone else out there like "me." The first person is used to bring reality to this struggle and to give examples—some humorous in a self-depreciative way—of how things worked out. There is a slow buildup over time of an understanding of the issues that the medicine of the time was not able to provide and mostly does not provide today. At the end, values are assigned in a general sense to more than eighty-five methods (used over about sixty-four years of living) found in this book. Advice: Do not buy this book and give it to someone else without reading it first to find out in your own opinion if it will be helpful to them. If you do and I find out about it, I will hunt you down and give you a solid thrashing. If you want to tell your friends that you were recently thrashed by a senior citizen, don

"Award-winning novelist and poet Gayle Brandeis's wrenching memoir of her complicated family history and her mother's suicide Gayle Brandeis's mother disappeared just after Gayle gave birth to her youngest child. Several days later, her body was found: she had hanged herself in the utility closet of a Pasadena parking garage. In this searing, formally inventive memoir, Gayle describes the dissonance between being a new mother, a sweet-smelling infant at her chest, and a grieving daughter trying to piece together what happened, who her mother was, and all she had and hadn't understood about her. Around the time of her suicide, Gayle's mother had been working on a documentary about the rare illnesses she thought ravaged her family: porphyria and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. In The Art of Misdiagnosis, taking its title from her mother's documentary, Gayle braids together her own narration of the charged weeks surrounding her mother's suicide, transcripts of her mother's documentary, research into delusional and factitious disorders, and Gayle's own experience with misdiagnosis and illness (both fabricated and real). Slowly and expertly, The Art of Misdiagnosis peels back the complicated layers of deception and complicity, of physical and mental illness in Gayle's family, to show how she and her mother had misdiagnosed one another. Gayle's memoir is both a compelling search into the mystery of one's own family and a life-affirming story of the relief discovered through breaking familial and personal silences.Written by a gifted stylist, The Art of Misdiagnosis delves into the tangled mysteries of disease, mental illness, and suicide and comes out the other side with grace"--

In Back from the Brink, author Graeme Cowan?who has suffered from severe depression himself?presents candid and poignant interviews with people from all walks of life who have struggled with serious depression and bipolar disorder; such as Bob Boorstin, the director of public policy at Google, former tennis star Cliff Ritchey, and talk-show host Trisha Goddard. As these interviewees detail their treatment, their successes, and their setbacks, readers are offered real hope and real advice, as well as practical tools for recovering from their own depression. The book also explores various treatment options that readers can take away to begin healing.