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 d cor, or even a haircut

Inspired by his own life experience, Clinical Psychologist 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" to your life, get the ball rolling, and start really feeling better, instead of just reassuring others. You'll learn to set healthy goals for your body like eating and sleeping well, as well as healthy goals for your mind. Most importantly, you'll discover how to view your life through the lens of your own deepest values, which will spark a commitment to real, lasting change.

The best thing about change is that you can start anywhere. By building a life--moment by moment--of rewarding behaviors that correspond to your values, you have the recipe for getting and staying well at your fingertips. This book will guide your way.

Americans are addicted to happiness. When we're not popping pills, we leaf through scientific studies that take for granted our quest for happiness, or read self-help books by everyone from armchair philosophers and clinical psychologists to the Dalai Lama on how to achieve a trouble-free life: "Stumbling ""on Happiness"; "Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive ""Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment"; "The ""Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living. "The titles themselves draw a stark portrait of the war on melancholy. More than any other generation, Americans of today believe in the transformative power of positive thinking. But who says we're "supposed "to be happy? Where does it say that in the Bible, or in the Constitution? In "Against Happiness," the scholar Eric G. Wilson argues that melancholia is necessary to any thriving culture, that it is the muse of great literature, painting, music, and innovation--and that it is the force underlying original insights. Francisco Goya, Emily Dickinson, Marcel Proust, and Abraham Lincoln were all confirmed melancholics. So enough Prozac-ing of our brains. Let's embrace our depressive sides as the wellspring of creativity. What most people take for contentment, Wilson argues, is living death, and what the majority takes for depression is a vital force. In Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy, Wilson suggests it would be better to relish the blues that make humans people. Eric G. Wilson is the Thomas H. Pritchard Professor of English at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The recipient of several important awards, including a National Humanities Center year-long fellowship, he is the author of five books on the relationship between literature and psychology. Consumer trends and popular medical and psychological interests indicate that Americans are addicted to happiness. At an increasing rate, they pop pills, seek both clinical and non-traditional therapies, read recent scientific studies that take for granted the population's quest for happiness, or buy self-help books by everyone from armchair philosophers and clinical psychologists to the Dalai Lama on how to achieve a trouble-free life: "Stumbling on Happiness," "Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment"; "The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living." The titles themselves draw a stark portrait of the war on melancholy.
More than any other generation, Americans today believe in the transformative power of positive thinking. Happiness is considered a liberty, if not an ultimate life goal. But the scholar Eric G. Wilson argues that melancholia is necessary to any thriving culture, that it is the muse of great literature, painting, music, and innovation--and that it is the force underlying original insights. Francisco Goya, Emily Dickinson, Marcel Proust, and Abraham Lincoln--all confirmed melancholics.
What most people take for contentment, Wilson argues, is living death, and what the majority sees as depressive is a vital force that inspires creativity, spurs ambition, and helps people form more intimate bonds with one another. It's time to throw off the shackles of positivity and relish the blues that make us human. "Mr. Wilson's basic thesis is that, without suffering, the human soul becomes stagnant and empty . . . We must live between the poles of sadness and joy and not try to expunge misery from our lives. Mr. Wilson makes a strong case . . . to deny our essential sadness in the face of a tragic world is to suppress a large part of what we are as human beings."--Colin McGinn, "The Wall Street Journal"" " "Utilitarianism is the philosophical doctrine according to which happiness is the sole intrinsic value--the only thing that is good in itself. Although invented by 19th-century Britons, notably Jeremy Bentham and J.S. Mill, utilitarianism has some claim to be the official philosophy of the U.S.A. or, as a philosopher might have it, the 'Utilitarian States of America.' In America, happiness is what makes life good, and unhappiness is what makes it bad. We must therefore seize the former and avoid the latter. Eric G. Wilson, a professor of English at Wake Forest University, disagrees, contending that utilitarianism has it the wrong way around. The 'happy types, ' as he calls them, are apt to be bland, superficial, static, hollow, one-sided, bovine, acquisitive, deluded and foolish. Sold on the ideal of the happy smile and the cheerful salutation, they patrol the malls in dull uniformity, zombie-like, searching for contentment and pleasure, locked inside their own dreams of a secure and unblemished world, oblivious to objective reality, cocooned in a protective layer of bemused well-being . . . Mr. Wilson's basic thesis is that, without suffering, the human soul becomes stagnant and empty. We can only reach our full potential through pain--not a pathological kind of pain but the kind that comes from a recognition of death, decay and the bad day (or decade). We must live between the poles of sadness and joy and not try to expunge misery from our lives. Mr. Wilson makes a strong case for this anti-utilitarianism, in prose both spare and lavish. (Of Coleridge he writes: 'He was hurt into these sublimities. He was axed into ecstasy.') And indeed, to deny our essential sadness in the face of a tragic world is to suppress a large part of what we are as human beings. It is to retreat into a fearful solipsism, refusing to peep out into the world beyond--an approach to life that is all the more fatuous in that it can never succeed . . . Mr. Wilson's case for the dark night of the soul brings a much needed corrective to today's mania for cheerfulness. One would almost say that, in its eloquent contrarianism and earnest search for meaning, "Against Happiness" lifts the spirits."--Colin McGinn, "The Wall Street Journal""
"

" Wilson has] the passionate soul of a nineteenth-century

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."

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't take my advice.

On July 24th, 2004, author Graeme Cowan took pen to paper and said goodbye to his family. "I just can't be a burden any longer," he wrote. After four failed suicide attempts, and a five-year episode of depression that his psychiatrist described as the worst he had ever treated, Cowan set out on a difficult journey back from the brink. Since then, he has dedicated his life to helping others struggling with depression and bipolar disorder--and that is how this book came to be.

A reporter for "The Washington Post" describes her life-long struggle with depression, recounting her painful efforts to comprehend and treat her illness

Mild depressions are so insidious that sufferers often don't seek help. They think, "that's just the way I am. There's really not much I can do about it." As Dr. Michael Thase and science writer Susan S. Lang reveal, they can do something about it. Persistent mild depression, which afflicts up to 35 million Americans, can be readily and permanently cured.
In Beating the Blues, Thase and Lang show how chronic mild depression can be relieved by learning strategies that help sufferers to recognize and change negative and distorted thinking patterns that lead to a downward spiral of pessimism. They reveal that a combination of medication and therapy has been shown to be the most effective treatment for mild depression, with an impressive 85% of patients experiencing full relief. Thase and Lang also discuss when a person should seek help from a therapist and what kinds of therapy seem the most effective. They outline the safer new antidepressants that are helpful for both mild and severe depressions, detailing each drug's strength and weakness; and examine alternative therapies, including stress management, physical exercise, acupuncture, supplements, and other mind/body therapies. Finally, they provide in-depth discussions of mild depression in children, adolescents, college students, and elderly parents, as well as those with chronic stress.
Beating the Blues is an inspiring and empowering book, offering everything a person needs to know in order to overcome mild depression.

"Beautiful Disasters" follows the downward spiral of the author's son from when his birth dad died when Cameron was 15 until his own untimely death at age 18. The author feels that her son's grief manifested into major depression which was the precursor to meth addiction, breaking the law, and finally his own death by suicide. This book shares the mental health professionals visits and rehabilitation they pursed in hopes of saving Cameron. The goal of this book is to make parents and others who come in touch with teens, aware of the signs of depression, grief, and substance abuse so they can perhaps a save a life.From a review..."While this story is grim, it is written with frankness and candor and can offer insights or solace to families going through a similar experience."