Customer Reviews

Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn't Teach You and Medication Can't Give You

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Dr. O'Connor served for 14 years as executive director of the Northwest Center for Family Service and Mental Health, a private, nonprofit mental health clinic in Litchfield County, Connecticut, overseeing the work of twenty mental health professionals in treating almost a thousand patients per year. He is a practicing psychotherapist, with offices in Canaan, Connecticut, and New York City. ....In his biography on this site, he states that he believes "depression can never be fully grasped by mental health professionals who have not experienced it." In Dr. O'Connor's case, as a therapist, he has a unique and powerful perspective because he is the son of a depressive who committed suicide, has suffered depression himself, and applied the insights presented in his book in his own life to heal his depression.

This book is very well-written, clear and accessible even when the doctor is talking about complex, professional issues in the mental health community. There is a thorough index and plentiful endnotes, as well as a very complete bibliography of recommended reading. The four sections of the book listed in the table of contents are: What We Know about Depression; Learning New Skills; Putting the Skills to Work; A New Synthesis.

I believe this is one of the top books ever written on depression. If you only have time to read one book on the subject, I would heartily recommend you make it this one, because it is utterly brilliant. I personally believe that one of the most profound things a theorist can do is synthesize seemingly opposing or unlike ideas, pulling them together in a comprehensible whole, which is what Dr. O'Connor does so very, very well here. He has thoroughly surveyed the existing information on depression, made clear what we know and don't know about it, and what most often works, or doesn't work, to treat depression.

In this regard, his discussion of why we don't have a comprehensive theory of depression at the present time is wonderful. Within this discussion he states: "The Freudian theory of human functioning has been on its last legs for some time, and we wait for a new theory, a new paradigm, to replace it….[A]lthough there is a wish to achieve a biochemical theory of human behavior, our current knowledge leaves us far from it; and if we had it, it would not answer our most interesting human questions."

He covers the effects of trauma on depression and the biological basis of mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, manic depression and major depression and how this conception removes stigma. Then he asserts that though symptoms of mental illness are "biochemically mediated, that doesn't make [them inevitably] biochemically caused…." He is not anti-medication, but he states that medications can't tell us how to raise healthy children, make difficult decisions, or help us find meaning in life. He believes that "both nature and nurture play a part in the development of depression"--and in its cure. He states that "in depression, you use medication to help alleviate the pain and suffering, but the patient may still feel a lack of confidence, be painfully shy, lack assertive skills, have a distorted self-image…procrastinate…be stuck in a loveless marriage or a dead-end job. The patient must address these kinds of issues…or else he may suffer less but still not be part of life."

It is this issue that the book addresses very thoroughly: how to engage in a deliberate skill-building program in conjunction with medication (or without it if you are one of the unlucky, sizeable percentage of depression sufferers diagnosed with "resistant depression" because antidepressants do not work for you). In his skill-building program, the author covers emotions, behavior, thinking, relationships, the self, and aids to recovery. He then discusses how to put these new skills to work on the job, in intimate relationships and in the community at large.

An extremely thorough, comprehensive, invaluable guide!

The author is quick the point out (and he is correct) that this book will not improve or cure depression by itself. You need professional help for that. Instead, the purpose of this book (which it magnificently addresses) is to describe what the depressed person and the depressed person's family and friends need to be doing to provide the maximum likelihood of overcoming depression. That's a reasonable promise and premise for a book on this important subject, and you can begin to overcome your ignorance (and the harm it can bring) by reading this book and acting on its advice.

First, the bad news. Depression is increasing. Worse still, the younger someone is, the more likely that the person will experience depression sometime. Even worse, many people are undiagnosed, and suffer alone with their affliction.

Second, the good news. Around 70 percent of all those suffering from depression will improve with either drug therapy or mental health treatments. Those who get both do even better.

Third, more bad news. Depression tends to recur for many people.

The voice addressing these issues is an expert one. He is a psychotherapist who runs a community health center. More importantly, he has suffered from depression himself. I doubt if you can get more direct access to what depression is all about than from Richard O'Connor. I admire his caring to share so much of his own pain with us, and respect him enormously for this gift he has given us all.

Depression is currently under reevaluation. No single paradigm seems to capture all of its elements. Undoubtedly, an improved scientific model for it will emerge. There are signs that it can have roots in disturbed relations between Mother and child, family dysfunction, possibly genetic disorders of brain chemistry (like using up seratonin too rapidly), other traumas, and poor thinking habits. Who knows what else may turn up?

Many people try to deal with this problem too much on their own. Families often put up with the depressed person's behavior, not knowing what else to do. Others reject the depressed person, which will usually make the situation worse. O'Connor lays out common sense guidelines that should make a diference: for depressed people, for those who care about them, and for those who treat them.

The author sees depression as a disease and as a social problem, "an illness to be treated professionally and a failure of adaptation that we must overcome through self-determinination." He outlines important principles for the depressed person: (1) Feel your feelings (depression is the suppression of feelings -- acknowledging those feelings often causes depression to improve). (2) Realize that nothing comes out of the blue (your depressed state has a root cause that you should look for in an event or situation). (3) Challenge your depressed thinking by questioning your assumptions, especially ones that center on meaningless perfectionism. (4) Establish priorities so that your energies go into what will be on what's most important to you. (5) Communicate as directly as possible to everyone around you. Depressed people are often poor communicators who don't get their emotional needs served. With better communication, they can experience a more supportive emotional environment. (6) Take care of your self. Learn to enjoy yourself. (7) Take and expect the right responsibility for yourself -- for your own actions. Depressed people often feel guilty about things that they have no responsibility for (like the death of a parent or the divorce of their parents). (8) Look for heroes. These role models can empower you to see the way to improve, especially if they were also depressed like Lincoln. (9) Be generous. Helping others puts your own situation into perspective. (10) Cultivate intimacy. This means letting down your defenses so people can see you as you are, and accept you for that. Depressed people often feel disgusted with their true selves, and hide that self from everyone. (11) Practice detachment. Depressed people are often overly critical and pessimistic. Seeing things in the proper perspective can heal a lot of inappropriate pain. (12) Get help when you need it. This may be the most important piece of advice since so many people do not.

The book is filled with personal examples and case studies of people the author has treated, which help make the points easier to understand.

I was astonished to realize that there is no self-help network like there is for alcoholics and those with other mental and behavioral problems. The author shares some experiences with having established such groups that can be a prototype for creating such a network in the future. I think that is an important priority for improving the mental health of our society from what this book shares.

Mental health professionals will find good advice for overcoming the parochialism of whatever discipline they originally trained in, to create links to the other treatments the depressed patients need. Those who provide therapy discussions will benefit from the author's own assessments of how therapies helped or did not help him. The therapist as caring adult is emphasized above the particular technique used.

I was fascinated by how often this book pointed out problems related to stalls that most people have such as poor communications, procrastination, misconception, disbelief, tradition, independence, purposelessness, wishful thinking, and avoidance of the unattractive. The depressed person seems to have more of these at the same time than the people I work with. Yet both groups have in common that they have not yet learned the stallbusting techniques that can improve or overcome these stalls. To some extent, the lack of understanding of how to focus our minds is one of the causes of depression in our society. So here is another reason to learn the questions and focus that can enormously improve personal and organizational effectiveness. I rate this book a 2,000 percent solution stallbuster, and hope that you will read it and apply its lessons. Whether you are depressed or not, we all will encounter depressed people and this book can make us more helpful to them.

Since reading this book, I have been greatly helped by it in understanding the depressed people I know. Following the advice here, they have made progress in moving away from depression. I am very grateful for having obtained this valuable knowledge.

Help everyone to walk, look, and feel on the bright side!

If you have just been diagnosed with depression, or someone who is close to you has, and you just want an overview of what depression is all about, then this is a good book to read as a first step. It brings together a lot of valuable general information and is written with experience and compassion. It will be of help to you if you are mildly depressed or even if you are merely unhappy with your life, but if you are a sufferer of major depression, this book is just not specific enough, it is too simplistic, and it does not contain anything new. There are chapters in the middle that discuss things like families, love, marriage, divorce, etc, that are in my opinion quite irrelevant.

The author admits that there is no one definite theory of the cause and treatment of depression, and so attempts to cover all the different approaches and put them together as package. This approach, whilst valid in theory, can be an overwhelming burden to juggle for a depressed person, who is made to feel that if he/she is not doing it all perfectly - keeping a mood journal, keeping a daily record of dysfunctional thoughts, eating well, in intense therapy, analyzing everything, etc - then he/she is not doing all they can to get well and this can make a depressed person feel a lot of needless guilt. I am very sceptical of this catch-all approach, it puts too much pressure on a depressed person for not nearly enough of a gain in their recovery. This approach will often make a depressed person feel that if they cannot manage all this constant self-actualization and exercises and analysis, etc (which they often can't - because they are depressed) that it then must be their own weakness making them depressed; this is extremely counter-productive. It is also unfortunate because some of the techniques can be of some help, but not if they are simplified and all jumbled together.

Having said all this, I do appreciate what the author is trying to do. This book is useful if you take from it what you think can help you right now, doing only what you can and want to, leaving the rest for another time. It won't change your life, but it will get you started and point you in the right directions for further help.

As a recovering depressive who believes knowledge is a pretty good weapon, I was already really tired of reading work on depression that is preachy, naive, alien to my experience and/or didn't tell me anything I didn't already know. By the time I read the first 100 pages of Undoing Depression, I'd learned more than I ever did in other books or therapy. (And, in the tradition of many depressives, I wept in catharsis. <g>) After O'Connor demonstrates that he knows depression inside and out, he offers real-life, plain-language, non-simplistic strategies for attacking each of the depressive lifestyle traits that continue to face many people who thought listening to Prozac would solve every problem. While I am sorry that O'Connor also struggles with depression, I can't help but think of this book as a gift to the rest of us.

In Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield (a fellow depressive if there ever was one) talks about the writers he'd like to call up because he enjo! ! yed their books so much. I'd love to call up ol'Richard O'Connor.

O'Connor is one of the best writers on depression I've read in 30 years as both a mental health professional and a sufferer. He weaves together research, theory, case examples and his own experience with depression in such a warm, down-to -earth way that reading this on depressed days, I am comforted that it really IS possible to undo depression. Self-help exercises are included. His main point -- that whatever "official" therapy we take in terms of counseling or medication, change is really about noticing our depressive thought and behavior patterns and working to change them, is what it's all really about in my experience. He acknowledges the pain and hard work in this -- again, one of the unique aspects of his writing is its warmth and tone of friendship and fellowship for the journey.

Once in a while you come across a book on a very important subject that actually makes sense from the first page to the last page ... and this is one of these books. If you've suffered from depression or are currently depressed or perhaps depression by a loved one or a co-worker has affected you, then this book will help. How? Well, it shows that many depressive trends are based on thought patterns and the author analyses how depression develops and continues to hunt individuals throughout their lives. Then the author offers effective solutions how to avoid such trends and change traps that may lead to depression. Another book that I found extremely helpful and which also focuses on behavioral patterns as well as the roots of depression and solutions to avoid it and be healed from depression is Dietmar Scherf's I LOVE ME: Avoiding & Overcoming Depression.

I could hardly believe how much hope reading Undoing Depression has brought into my life. Every time I spend some time with the book I come away with something helpful. An internet search led me to the web site of the same name, then I purchased the book. Dr. O'Connor knows what he is talking about...he is both a psychotherapist and a sufferer of depression, plus he has a beautiful way of explaining things, a way you can get through even when you are feeling very overwhelmed. Thank you, thank you for sharing your knowledge and experience with others.

In the book "Undoing Depression", Dr. Richard O'Conner has given people a light, a ray of hope, and an in-depth understanding to a condition from which many Americans suffer.

The one thing that strikes you the minute you open the book it Dr. O'Conner's straight forward, honest way of writing that both envelops and comforts you at the same time. He uses the pronoun "we" quite a bit, building up the idea of a community of people with you who suffer with you. Depression can be such an isolating illness; the fact that there are millions of others who share the same thoughts, feelings, and moods is a blessing.

Each chapter has gems of wisdom that I found myself reading and re-reading constantly, trying to learn and understand his ideas. In these are the source of great knowledge, all designed to propel you forward in understanding what's occuring inside of you and more importantly, how to break that cycle and move forward. He directly address emotions, relationships, the self, and other concepts in easy to read chapters. He is honest but also fair minded, both of which I appreciated.

I have encountered other books on depression, but this one is practical, user friendly, and full of "can use" information. Anyone suffering from the dibilitating effects of depression can rest assured that there is hope, and combined with treatment options available to everyone today, can find the place where the clouds are really behind you.

How much can we expect a book to change our life? Three years ago my therapist gave me an assignment to read Undoing Depression. He knew I was a hard case and would have never done so on my own. Since then I have begged dozens of friends [and students] to read it, often having a tough time because "What are you talking about? I'm not depressed." I tell them if reading for an hour doesn't produce something they can use in their lives, "I'll eat my hat."

I'm a depressed teen who went through all of the major depression and now have chronic depression, mostly. My life went to shambles because of my depression, and I mostly kept all of my bad habits from that old depression, namely that I thought feeling 'bad' was a normal feeling ('feeling bad' is not feeling sadness, sorrow, or normal worry but feeling sour and feelingless all the time).

I think he kept the whole thing pretty real throughout the whole book, encouraging us to see where our lives basically fall apart at random events (mine was neglect and abuse) and how basically everyone runs into problems, and that most depressives just get really unlucky. But having gone through it himself and knowing where it comes from, he seems to have mastered a lot of the things, and just from that I give him an A for confidence to come out and say all of this stuff. I think anyone could benefit from the book, but for most depressives who are in major depression, don't you dare touch this. It's an amazing resource for the post-depressed who struggle with depressive habits, but it's a terrible tragedy for people who are depressed. It will probably only make them worse as they continue to think about how 'good' they'd feel recovering. For them I just recommend lots of relaxation and therapy, and time to get over it.

Good luck to anyone who reads this book. (It's an easy read.) May your depression be swift to leave and/or may you gain whole understanding of the problems that depressed people have.