Binding: Digital
Label: Amazon
Manufacturer: Amazon
Number Of Pages: 32
Publication Date: 2007-11-22
Publisher: Amazon
Release Date: 2007-11-22
Studio: Amazon

Why did I write Surviving America's Depression Epidemic? Many people have lost faith in psychiatric orthodoxy because it has failed them, their friends, or family. Increasing numbers of people feel alienated from an extremist consumer culture, and I believe that mental health treatments favored by pharmaceutical and insurance companies increase despair by ignoring the depressing effects of such a culture. I believe that Americans crave commonsense explanations for depression that lead directly to individual and societal solutions. I wanted to share what I've learned about the limitations of mental health professional training as well as what I've learned outside of such training about morale, healing, community, and other antidotes to depression.

Customer Rating:
Summary: The Best Book I Have Ever Read on Depression...
Comment: ...and I have read many. The author discusses aspects and causes of depression ignored by mainstream psychiatry and offers compelling solutions with integrity, honesty, and compassion.


Also worth looking at:
When Panic Attacks: The New, Drug-Free Anxiety Therapy That Can Change Your Life

The Mindful Way through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness

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Customer Rating:
Summary: The Book That Cured My Depression
Comment: The reviews here for this book so far have been pretty detached and impersonal. I'm now going to provide a personal account. I do not say this lightly: This book saved my life.

Last year I picked up Bruce Levine's "Surviving America's Depression Epidemic" at Barnes & Noble as a sort of impulse buy. I was scouring the self-help/psychology section during what was probably my worst depressive episode of my entire life. I don't know what possessed me to pick this particular book. I seriously wasn't expecting much. I wasn't actually familar with the author and the title itself is sort of hokey-sounding. I was prepared for nothing more than a superficial rewording of stuff that I'd already heard a million times or some crackpot theory. However, as soon as I got past the title and started on the introduction, I realized I was reading something very, very different. Dr. Levine's book is well-written, well-researched (the last 24 or so pages of the book consists of copious bibliographical notes), and well-designed. But it isn't just rehashing of old information with a new wrapper. Levine culls much insight out of the available research on not only the nature of what we call "depression" but also into the way we live.

What most struck me was that Levine absolutely refuses to oversimplify the problem of depression. He tackles the issues from an expansive sociological framework that puts what clinical psychology labels as an "illness" into a wider historical, social, and personal context. His thesis is as follows (quoting from the Introduction itself):

"Americans live in the age of industrialized medicine, and everyone - inside and outside of health care - is now in the same boat. Doctors are financially pressured to be speedy mechanics, and patients often recieve assembly-line treatment, which can be a painful reminder of their assembly-line lives. While most Americans manage to go to work and pay their bills, more than a few struggle just to get out of bed, and growing numbers feel fragile, hollow, hopeless, and defeated.

"In 1998, Martin Seligman, then president of the American Psychological Association, spoke to the National Press club about an American depression epidemic: '[W]e discovered two astonishing things about the rate of depression across the century. The first was there now is between ten and twenty times as much of it as there was fifty years ago. And the second is that it has become a young person's problem. When I first started working in depression thirty years ago... the average age of onset was 29.5. Now the average age is between fourteen and fifteen.'

"Despite the unparalleled material wealth of the United States, we Americans - especially our young - are increasingly unhappy. What is happening in our society and culture? How is it that the more we have come to rely on mental health professionals, the higher the rates of depression? And are we in need of a different approach to overcoming despair?"

Levine tackles these questions with tenacity and wisdom I've never seen in any other book on depression. He redefines depression itself as a coping mechanism to shut down the anguish we feel. He offers hope to those who feel sensitive and misunderstood by relating historical examples (from Abraham Lincoln to Kurt Cobain) and offers insights into how we as individuals can find ourselves at odds with the society we grew up in. Depression is not a disease to be anesthetized with drugs, but a vital cry of our own humanity calling out to us in a largely dehumanizing world. Doctors no longer treat us as individuals just when we truly need it, but rather we become a list of symptoms and a consequent prescription.

This all may sound at odds with the current research on depression as a biological disorder organic to the brain. However, Levine reveals that this isn't at all at odds with the current RESEARCH (which has never supported a purely chemical genesis for depression) but rather the current THEORY of biological depression as popularized almost exclusively by pharmaceutical industry propaganda. It's interesting that Levine wrote this book several months prior to the widely publicised findings earlier this year (originally made public by The Wall Street Journal in January 2008) of a survey of studies submitted to the FDA that were never published. (The survey revealed that the alleged efficacy of antidepressants may have been highly inflated.)

Levine's plan of healing is empathetic, wise, and liberating. Unlike most such book there are absolutely no exercises or tedious worksheets or charts to fill out. Instead, Levine weaves in a hugely comprehensive list of approaches to healing including nurturing emotional openness, fostering friendships, using artistic expression, exercise, community activism and even ritualism as a means of coping.

A good portion of his approach is influenced by Buddhist psychology, with a particular emphasis on mindfulness and forgoing ego-attachments. This application of Eastern meditative traditions to depression has also recently been expounded upon by another group of psychologists in The Mindful Way through Depression, which also came out last year. That book provides excellent advice and tools for preventing relapse of depression, although it lacks the social/emotional insights that Levine elaborates on quite eloquently. That said, it is still an excellent resource.

I must state here and now that this book is not for people who have already made up their minds about depression and already decided they are "cured." If, however, you are like me and have not been helped by the current mental health industry and still feel numb, hurting, and lost in your life, I urge you to give this book a chance. One other point that I actually found quite refreshing was his criticism of talk-therapies such as CBT, and the clinical patient-therapist relationship. He acknowledges that such a relationship (a kind of "paid friendship") may not be the most conducive to healing and, in fact, may actually exacerbate the problem.

Had I heard what the book was about before I had the chance to actually read it, I might have dismissed it. However, several months after finishing it, my life has been completely transformed and I no longer feel so "broken." The term life-affirming gets thrown around a lot these days. But I cannot hesitate to call this a life-affirming read for anyone who is still struggling.

Levine also takes an interesting angle that I was not aware of when I first bought it (but apparently is in concert with the publisher's - Chelsea Green Publishing - credo). Levine posits that the society of consumer culture that contributes to depression cannot be sustainable in the long run. This is interesting and, although it may seem irrelevant when you just want to feel better, it actually helped me get out of my own head and see depression as a cultural problem as well. In other words, it helped me stop taking depression so personally. (This is an important point, and Chapter 5 deals with the dangers of "Self Absorption.") It is truly liberating to realize there may not be anything really wrong with YOU if you are depressed, but there may indeed be some things very wrong with the society you live in.

And, if all that wasn't enough incentive to buy a copy, for the environmentally conscientious among us, Chelsea Green publishes all their books on recycled paper! You can't go wrong.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: best new medical bebunking around
Comment: This is my favorite medical-debunking book of late, very related to the topic of end of empire, which is why I put it in my listmania of that topic, along with books on climate disaster, corporate/imperial/military-industrial complex overreach, peak oil and etc!). Levine is an erudite genius and skillfully and wholistically weaves anthropology, history, sociology and art in with his vast knowledge of orthodox medicine. Especially fascinating are his little known revelations, such as: during antebellum times in the USA, a slave who was a chronic runaway or disobedient would be diagnosed with a mental illness. Levine ties this in with current diagnosis of rebellious teenagers with their very own dysfunction to be medicated, ("compulsive anti-authoritarianism" (?) Well, I can't recall the term right now, had to return the book to the library, alas, but I suspect I will check it out again and again and eventually break down and buy it, which is a rare occurence. That just shows you how much I admire this book and find it valuable, especially coming from a large family full of misfit artistic melancholic, indigenous anti authority types).
~ Lesley Thomas, author of award-winning arctic shaman eco-novel Flight of the Goose

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Customer Rating:
Summary: The rate of depression in the U.S. has increased tenfold in the last fifty years
Comment: The rate of depression in the U.S. has increased tenfold in the last fifty years, indicating an underlying social issue as well as a health challenge. Surviving America's Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy and Community in A World Gone Crazy surveys the roots of these issues, discussing how to revitalize depressed people and a depressing culture and offering insights on how to change ideas and behavior patterns. Both college-level holdings strong in psychology and general-interest lending libraries will find this a most accessible account identifying the foundations of societal depression and offering plenty of insights on how to combat it.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Agreed--a book that finally makes sense about depression
Comment: This book is much more than a self-help book--the issue is bigger than any one individual. All of us, whether we're depressed ourselves or not, have been touched by depression through friends, family, and colleagues. This book helps make sense of it all and offers suggestions about how, collectively, we get on the road to recovery. I am recommending this book to people at every opportunity. Dr. Levine hits the nail on the head.

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