This book describes the depressive in his or her natural habitat, studies the everyday problems that cause one's depression, and develops treatment approaches directed to the depressive's real-world plight. It explores the borderland between the sacred and the profane, the academic and the popular, the scientific but impractical, and the practical but unscientific. It relies as much on common sense, anecdote, and individual insight as it does on case histories and psychological test protocol. The book is divided into four sections: description, cause, prevention, and treatment. The descriptive section presents the mental-status abnormalities in depression, includes a differential diagnosis of "classic" depressive symptoms, indicates when so-called classic symptoms of another disorder are in fact depressive, lists the physical complaints that are the product of depression, discusses normal depression, and touches briefly on hypomania. The section on cause recognizes that real troubles are common and chemical troubles rare. It suggests that people do not get depressed because they are "under stress" or they have "suffered loss," but, in simple language, because their boss has threatened to fire them, their wife has threatened to leave, the cat has died, and other similar real-life difficulties. It faces the problems that therapists and patients alike find unpalatable, shameful, and threatening--the things that cause patients to close their eyes or speak in remote euphemisms. The sections on prevention and therapy are not attached to any one school of thought. They are formulated and expressed simply and humanistically, and offer common-sense solutions to the depressives's everyday problems with themselves and their world.
For many people the hardest life challenge to overcome involves the anxiety associated with finding and keeping intense, lasting, committed, long-term, loving relationships. This anxiety is typically the product of a disorder called AvPD, or Avoidant Personality Disorder. This disorder doesn't take life, but it does ruin it. I have treated so many people I know and love succumbing to its ravages that I felt the urgency to write books that offer the layman a step by step method for coping with and overcoming this emotional difficulty.
Mine are the only books that deal with AvPD as an entity, not as a subvariety of Social Phobia. This is significant because the treatment is different in each case: treatment of social phobia should emphasize cognitive-behavioral interventions, while treatment of AvPD additionally requires uncovering via a psychoanalytically-oriented and interpersonal approach that goes beyond attempting to reverse symptoms directly to halting the process of anxious interpersonal withdrawal through uncovering its roots.
The Essential Guide to Overcoming Avoidant Personality Disorder is the third book I have written on the topic, but it is the first with material primarily directed toward individuals who finding themselves lonely and isolated because of relationship anxiety long for a self-help approach based on understanding to overcome the relational terrors that keep them from experiencing the fulfillment that can only come from closeness and commitment to significant others.
