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Facing depression

FACING DEPRESSION
A practical handbook
By Michael Lawson
Hodder & Stoughton. 208 pages. £6.99.
ISBN 0 340 69066 6

This is the second edition of a book that comes with high commendation from Dr. Roger Hurding as wise, factual, practical and spiritual. The author tells us that the first edition of 1989 'has been widely translated and read across the world'.

The author has evidently read widely in books by those trained and experienced in the treatment of depression, as becomes a former Director of Pastoring. I have to admit my admiration for the author's powerful mind and his liking for an ordered presentation: he once told me it might be because he had once been a schoolmaster.

It is called a self-help book, for those depressed and those who need to help others with depression. He deals first with the facts and what we know about why people get depressed. Then he deals with the importance of the past, with a diagram of a life cycle and helpful explanations of life events. He then deals in a practical way with how to analyse the present for triggers and for reactions which may make us more depressed. Some may be surprised that he switches, in a chapter on Burnout, from giving the facts we now about this, to a study of Elijah.

The second half of the book is more concerned with a kind of Bible study of some aspects of the subject, mixed with what are sometimes called bullets - one-liner questions or instructions in an 'action plan'.

It has been evidently successful, and I trust it will continue to be of help. Who is it for? Not, I think, for the severely depressed. Perhaps someone who has seen an appropriately trained and experienced doctor or psychologist might then find this book useful. One reader, experienced in the non-medical helping of the depressed person, found the author's tone very authoritarian: 'He tells you what to do when the whole point is you can't pull yourself together when you are really low'. Others, like the middle-aged man quoted in the introduction by the author, will praise it as a major resource. The reader must taste and see! I would have liked such a book to have an index and a list of books the author might have found helpful in his writing. Perhaps, in the next edition, these might be added?

Gaius Davies