Depression Is a Choice: Winning the Battle Without Drugs [Hardcover]

A.B. Curtiss (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 3, 2001

While recognizing that in its most extreme forms depression is best treated through pharmaceutical and psychoanalytical intervention, Curtiss argues convincingly that most people can control the syndrome without the use of drugs and without the burden of endless therapy. To illustrate this, she draws from her own experiences with depression, anecdotes from her practice, and a wealth of information about the history of the treatment of depression. This helpful book encourages those people to take responsibility for their symptoms, and gives them the steps they need to fight and win the battle against depression.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In overwritten, overlong text, Curtiss (Time of the Wild), a cognitive behavioral therapist, author of children's books and contributing writer to the New York Times, etc., explains how to overcome depression without drugs. The suggestions herein stem chiefly from her personal experience: her periods of deep depression, followed by manic incidents that led her, for example, to launch poorly conceived business ventures that lost money. She also, somewhat capriciously, left her husband and children for a year to live in an ashram. She explains how she freed herself from years of ups and downs by following her own program of "directed thinking." According to Curtiss, as soon as one becomes aware of depressed or manic feelings, one must "as an act of will, replace the accidental, unchosen thoughts that have caused the problem with new, positive, neutral or commonsense thoughts or actions." Even in cases resulting from chemical imbalances in the brain, contends Curtiss, it's simply a question of learning how to employ the mind. She feels strongly that prescription drugs coupled with "psychologized thinking" (i.e. the Freudian premise that "the mind and the self... are one and the same") will only mask, not help with depression. Curtiss also emphasizes the importance of traditional family values versus the current pursuit of individual happiness. However one feels about Curtiss's ideas, "directed thought" comes off as a murky offshoot of standard therapy; wading through the author's convoluted thought processes may cause rather than cure depression. Radio interviews.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

A number of recent self-help titles enable sufferers to try cognitive behavioral techniques, including Joseph Luciani's Self-Coaching: How To Heal Anxiety and Depression (LJ 4/15/01). Kaplan and Turkington's Making the Antidepressant Decision is a new edition of their Making the Prozac Decision (Lowell House, 1994). The name change accurately reflects the work's coverage of all current antidepressant medications as well as indications for taking them and their side effects. While most of this edition isn't new, a few very important additions make it worth the low price, including a discussion of the newest Prozac-like drug, Celexa, and a chapter on St. John's Wort. Recommended for public libraries. Mary Ann Hughes, Neill P.L., Pullman, WA
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Hardcover: 496 pages
• Publisher: Hyperion (October 3, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786866292
• ISBN-13: 978-0786866298
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (48 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,034,186 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Frighteningly Biased, August 27, 2004

By 

Lear (California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Depression Is a Choice: Winning the Battle Without Drugs (Hardcover)

I came to look at this book after reading the Author's review of "The Best Awful" by Carrie Fisher. Fisher's book is about a disasterous trip into mania, followed by a suicidal depression that lands her in the mental hospital... _because she went off of her medication_. The author of this book writes the following in her review: "The remarkable thing is that in a culture where manic depression is encouraged by psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies who have formed an unholy, if unwitting, alliance; here's some one who has escaped. Not unscathed, mind you. But free nevertheless.". This statement captured a level of bias that really frightened me. What kind of "freedom" involves running blindly through alleyways in Tijuana, bleeding, fleeing, high on opiates and a crashing mania? Or crashing into a stupor, spending days at a time staring at the wall while your child cries, wondering where her mother went, until your friends drag you away to a mental hospital? Sure, maybe some people, like the author, feel that life is just fine that way -- but I'm sure a lot of people _don't_.

For me personally, finding medication that stopped my bipolar moodswings WAS THE BEST THING THAT HAS EVER HAPPENED TO ME IN MY ENTIRE LIFE. No amount of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy could "fix" me, until I was in enough control of my moods to actually think reasonably, with a coherent understanding that didn't reverse direction every week. In the author's bio, she speaks of having "left her husband and children for a year to live in an ashram". I couldn't get close to having a husband -- no one ever wanted to stay with me longer than a year; I was too unstable, violent to myself and others. I was not "forced" into taking medication; I went searching for it after years of struggling and failed therapy. It was only after starting medication that I could possibly begin to get back in control of my life.

I am absolutely certain that the techniques mentioned in this book can help cope with depression; cognitive-behavioral therapy is wonderful this way, and I have found it greatly useful _once I started medication_. But 'throw the medicine out the door; it's just being pushed on you by money-grubbing multinational corporations' is a frighteningly biased viewpoint that can be very dangerous (as in Fisher's "The Best Awful"), or even fatal
to people with very real, serious mood disorders, for which there is ample biochemical and genetic evidence that something deeper than behavior has gone wrong.

The choice to be on or to forgo medication is not one to make based on bias. It must be made by knowing what works for you. If taken entirely to heart, this book could save the lives of some people. What I am afraid of is the damage it could cause to others, who are not as strong and capable of controlling the chaos of bipolar disorder as the author is.

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Indeed it is, February 24, 2003

By 

A. B. Schwartz "A. B. Schwartz" (Bloomington, IN United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Depression Is a Choice: Winning the Battle Without Drugs (Hardcover)

I waited over six months after reading Depression Is a Choice to reflect on the book and put its principles into action. I can tell you that for me at least, Curtiss is correct--depression is indeed a choice.

By that I don't mean that if something bad happens--we lose a loved one for example--that we can "choose" whether or not to be happy. What I have found is that I get into habits of what I call "despairing": a knee-jerk reaction to give up, get into despair, and get depressed.

That's when Curtiss' technique of "directed thinking" saves the day. I can get myself out of the depressed mood by choosing different thoughts which then change my mood. That's all depression is, after all--a temporary mood that engulfs me because of some thoughts that I'm generating. I am free to direct my thoughts the same way I direct my cursor to tell my computer what I want it to do.

This is not denial of the painful aspects of life. Rather, it's not adding needless suffering by mental self-torture--something I'm all too good at. It requires a certain vigilance and effort to direct my thinking, but the rewards are worth it. I also find it helpful to "let go" of the thoughts that lead to depression. (For more on letting go, I suggest looking into The Sedona Method.)

In a society where most of us avoid taking responsibility for our feelings, where the medical profession is all too willing to pathologize our behavior and medicate us to make us feel better, Depression Is a Choice is a subversive book. I am grateful that the author had the courage to write it.

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Interesting concept, but terrible book, October 25, 2005

By 

H. Case (Michigan) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Depression Is a Choice: Winning the Battle Without Drugs (Hardcover)

I am giving this two stars because I think it merits an extra one for making the radical statement that depression and manic-depression can be managed without drugs. I do agree that many people get trapped in self-defeating cycles of depression and mania, which could probably be broken if they allowed it as a possibility. However, I think that she veers close to Tom Cruise territory, claiming that anyone who resorts to antidepressants is "weak". I've dealt with depression since childhood, but at this point I can't tell if it was genetic or if I just learned the habits and continued to reinforce them in myself into adulthood. It may be a question of the chicken or the egg here. Ultimately I don't think it matters and I tend to agree with the author that cognitive-behavioral therapy can help and that there isn't any proof of such a thing as "chemical imbalance" causing mental illness. There isn't. The fact that brains of depressed people are different than brains of "healthy" people doesn't prove that something organic within the person's body caused the depression. It could just as well be the opposite, that it is the depression that changes the brain.

What bothered me most about this book, though, is that I tried reading it twice more than a year apart and both times got extremely bored by about halfway through the book. Reading about the stupid, rude or irresponsible things the author did before she figured out that she could manage her own mania and depression was not helpful to me in the least. The redundant writing style cried out desperately for an editor. The author also sounded tediously self-aggrandizing as well, leading me to believe that she was in one of her admitted fits of mania when she wrote it. In short, if she's trying to convince anyone that they can stabilize their own moods and emotions, her book should seem like she has done so for herself.

I'd love to see a book like this in the hands of an author who didn't feel the need to go on for hundreds of pages about herself, as I think the book contains a good idea. The poor execution here makes me unable to recommend the book to anyone else.