Customer Reviews

Getting Up When You're Feeling Down: A Woman's Guide to Overcoming and Preventing Depression

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I still have my 1990 copy of Braiker's "Getting Up When You're Feeling Down," and I will have to replace it. I've read it so many times that the spine is broken and the book is held together with tape. The book is very helpful for women who are dealing with depression. Whether you're suffering a garden variety "blue mood" from a bad month, or you've had several terrible years, this book gives a lot of simple psychological techniques for keeping your moods "up" and coping with depressions when they do occur. Even people taking medication for more serious depressions will benefit from the simple mental exercises she recommends for "halting" negative thoughts; the book provides valuable insights on women's thought patterns, and how we can stop depressions from worsening. I came to Amazon today to buy this book for a friend!

This is a very intelligently written guide on contending with Depression.It special focus on women in depression, and ways they can admit their depression to themselves, understand it and act upon it. Many of its tips are I believe extremely useful, for instance that of avoiding excessive rumination when one is depressed, and instead finding outlets in action. There is also clear analysis presented here of the way Depression is a disorder in thought, and recommendations on how the depressed person should begin to avoid the kinds of distortions common in depressed people. Among those distortations are undue generalization, selecting always the bad detail in a situation and focusing on that, imagining one can read the thoughts of others , and imagining them hostile when there is no real evidence for this.
The author is clearly a knowledgable professional with long experience in the field. I do have one problem with the book. It is perhaps too long, too detailed, too filled with information and questionnaires for most of those who are depressed to deal with. After all when a person is depressed their level of energy, including intellectual energy is lower, their ability to contend with outside things is less.
I believe a more condensed book, and one focusing on aspects of action, the practical steps to help take one out of Depression would be helpful for more people.
Nonetheless this work seems to me a fundamentally correct way of looking at the problem, a problem which in one way or another confronts most people at some time in their lives.