Customer Reviews

Depression and Hope: New Insights for Pastoral Counseling

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book has changed my ministry. I have been a pastor for 20 years with a degree in social work and lots of graduate credits in pastoral care and counseling, and did not expect this book to impact me so much. Stone makes a solid case for a framework for pastoral counseling that is of necessity short-term and forward looking. Then he puts ministry to those who are depressed, the "common cold of mental health," into that context. The result is outstanding. It is a foundational work for my own book with Augsburg Fortress that will be out in 2002, titled "When You Are Depressed." This review is unsolicited and heartfelt. +

While there are some useful cognitive therapies in this book, it's really aimed at people with mild depression -- which wasn't made clear until about a third of the way through the book, which was frustrating to me (I was reading and thinking, "I do not see [beloved of mine who struggles with severe depression] in here at all"). While the author talks about depression as distinct from, for example, healthy grief, and takes seriously the utility of, for example, antidepressant medications, the book generally seems to me to skew too far toward thinking yourself out of depression and isn't attentive enough to the reality of e.g. neurochemical factors beyond the sufferer's control.

Introduction: A View of Depression (Depression on the Rise, The Depressed as Church Members) PART ONE: ASSESSMENT Chap 1: Characteristics of Depression (Causes of Depression, Major Depression, Grief, Alcohol). Chap 2: Melancholy and Spiritual Desolation (Dark Night of the Soul, Accidie, Desolations, Anfechtungen, Discernment). Chap 3: Suicide and Depression (Assessing Suicide Risk, The Minister's Response to Suicide). Chap 4: Family Life of the Depressed (Impact of Depression on Interpersonal Relations, Marriage and Depression, Gender Differences, Children and Adolescents). Chap 5: Framing Hope (Reframing, Establishing Future Goals, Hope-Oriented Conversation, Strengths). PART TWO: ACTION Chap 6: Brief Pastoral Counseling of Depression: A Fourfold Approach (Assessment of Depression, How Clergy Think about Depression, The First Session, Counseling Methods). Chap 7: Interpersonal Interventions: Strengthening Intimate Relationships (Relationships of the Depressed, Life with a Depressed Person; Individual, Couple and Family Counseling, Communication, Problem Solving and Change). Chap 8: Physiological Interventions: Prozac and Beyond (Physiological Vulnerability, Body Image, Hormones, Types of Antidepressant Medications, Sleep Disturbances, Exercise). Chap 9: Cognitive Interventions: Changing How People Think (Misinterpreting Experience, Information-Processing Errors, Changing How the Depressed Think, Countering Rumination). Chap 10: Behavioral Interventions: Shifting from Passive to Active Mode (Getting Active, Homework Tasks, Control, Obstacles to Getting Active, Helpful Activities for the Depressed, Counseling Methods to Change Behavior, Prescribing Depression).