You Mean I Don't Have to Feel This Way?: New Help for Depression, Anxiety, and Addiction - Softcover

Dowling, Colette

Softcover

ISBN 10: 055337169X ISBN 13: 9780553371697

Publisher: Random House Publishing Group, 1993

Synopsis

"A down-to-earth, hopeful, useful--and, from  the point of view of this 'recovered'  depressive--accurate account of how to treat  depression."--Mike Wallace, 60  Minutes.
Colette Dowling watched depression  destroy her husband's life and leap to the next  generation to nearly destroy her daughter's--until  dramatic help was found. Now her ground-breaking book  offer the same lifesaving help to the millions who  still suffer depression and related  disorders--which include panic, anxiety, phobias, PMS, alcohol  and drug abuse, bulimia, migraine, and obesity.  You Mean I Don't Have To Feel This Way?  documents the latest research that links  depression and related disorders to a physical cause and  shows why willpower, understanding, and  psychotherapy so often fail to work. It explains the  state-of-the-art medical treatments that can bring about  dramatic improvement--and often full recovery--within  weeks. This important book includes: startling new  links between eating disorders, addiction, and  depression. How to recognize the symptoms of  depression and anxiety disorders. Vital information about  new treatments for depressed children and  adolescents. A guide to breakthrough drugs for treating  mood, anxiety, and eating disorders. The newest  research on the use of antidepressants to prevent  substance-abuse relapse. How to find expert help and  evaluate the treatment you are given. Upbeat,  filled with hope and warmth, Colette Dowling's book  will change minds and save lives.

About this title

About the Author

Colette Dowling is an internationally known writer and lecturer whose books have been translated into 20 languages. She is the author of numerous books, including Maxing Out, Red Hot Mamas, You Mean I Don't Have to Feel This Way?, and The Cinderella Complex, which has been in print since it was first published in 1981. Her articles have appeared in many magazines, including The New York Times Magazine, New York, and Harper's. She lives in Woodstock, New York.

From Kirkus Reviews

Again, Dowling (Perfect Woman, 1988, etc.) uses personal experience--her daughter's depression--as the springboard for her writing, this time arguing for the primary role of brain biochemistry in a large number of illnesses frequently considered biological in origin. Dowling believes, along with Hudson and Pope (Harvard psychiatrists who identified affective spectrum disorder) that the level of serotonin, a brain hormone, has as much to do with mental status as do environmental influences, and she urges medication for depressed patients to restore and regulate equilibrium. Having seen her daughter successfully treated with an antidepressant, she eagerly encourages others to seek similar relief for mood disorders, and goes on to examine the broad range of diagnoses- -bulimia, PMS, obsessive-compulsive disorder, addictions, kleptomania--that respond to these medications. Psychiatrists, she finds, often take incomplete family histories, miss cases of depression, undermedicate, or fail to recognize and treat dual illnesses (e.g., depression and addiction). Also, most people see mood as a matter of personal control and resist professional intervention. Dowling realizes that many will resist this point of view (``Life is flattened, we feel, by a one-dimensional, chemical approach to the brain''), and she tries to persuade with anecdotal case histories, always recommending psychotherapy as part of the process, not merely to monitor dosages and possible side effects but also, as one psychiatrist sees it, to learn ``to unravel what is normal personality from what the illness has superimposed upon it.'' No researcher, Dowling admits, has established a cause-and- effect relationship between serotonin and these mood disorders, just an association, so she does not insist that her argument is more than plausible. She does insist, though, some antidepressant will always relieve these conditions, a certainty many psychiatrists will dispute. As in Dowling's previous books, readers will recognize themselves, welcome the accessible vocabulary, and appreciate the balanced presentation of related issues (will people use PMS as evidence of inferiority or reason for discrimination?). Expect the warmest response from a nonprofessional audience. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 055337169X
• ISBN 13: 9780553371697
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320