Read with caution
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My counsellor recommended this book when I had major clinical depression and was feeling very suicidal. After reading it I felt much worse. I felt the book confirmed the fact that I was useless and had no life skills. I felt very patronised and childish. The author, like a school teacher, suggests very simple things so how could I be so stupid not to be able to do this for myself? Ms Rowe seemed to suggest that the sepression was all my fault as, after all, it was me keeping myself in my prison!! Incidentally, my depression was caused by hypothyroidism, which the author failed to mention as a possible cause. For her, it was all psychological. I now take levothyroxine and have never felt better. I would never recommend this book to anyone unless they had a mild case of the blues. So...read with caution.
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Brilliant Book
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Reading through this book, I felt myself nodding and feeling like finally one person understood what I was going through.The practical advice and non-patronising tone made it easier to read as well.Helped me greatly in my five year journey out of depression. Very good book on the subject(compared to many others I've read)
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If you are depressed, you probably know more about it than Dorothy Rowe
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As someone who's suffered from depression since very early in my life, I found Dorothy Rowe sort of self-indulgent with her own ideas. The portrait that she draws of depression and the depressed person just didn't match my personal situation and experience. I think she has very narrow vision of the problem of depression, and a very narrow vision of the persons who suffer the problem. Rather than with authority, she seems to speak with authoritarianism. She has this extremely strict idea of what the depressed person is and she doesn't even consider the possibility of variation. Put simply, if you don't despise yourself and everyone around you, think you are wicked, that you don't deserve anything good from life; if you didn't suffer a tragedy or a big loss in your life..., then you are out of Rowe's universe of depressed people. Of course, she might argue that her truth is indisputable, that I'm just in denial...
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Extremes can help everyone see more clearly
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I only had one debilitating period of depression which lasted about eight months, and it was a long time ago, but Dorothy Rowe puts her finger on exactly how you sink into it: a profound disappointment leads to a sense of worthlessness and paralysis.
That in turn leads you to cut yourself off from other people and see the world in a dark hue. Her approach is not scientific, she just explains how she has been talking to depressed people for 20 years and these are her observations.
She's tough and controversial. I've read several other of Dorothy Rowe's books, I feel one a year is a good refresher course. This book is excellent. When I finished it, I remembered a line from Dr Eric Berne (Games People Play), "This may mean that there is no hope for the human race, but there is hope for individual members of it."
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This book is helpful for everyone
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This book is written by a very wise woman. The basic premise of the book is that depression is caused by events in our life (mainly in our childhood) that have developed the 'mental idea' that we are somehow bad. This feeling of badness was constructed by blaming oneself for the past mistakes of others (mainly our parents) and oneself instead of being easy-going about mistakes and forgiving about oneself and others. This thought process creates allsorts of justifications and rationalisations to sustain the ‘illusion’ of ones inherent badness which builds the fearful mental prison. Of course this idea that one is bad is just a figment of ones imagination built over time but it becomes more real than the reality of one being a living, breathing, feeling, thinking loving human being. This self image of badness in ones memory prevents one seeing the truth and dominates ones (re)actions. It is in seeing the falseness of this 'mentally created idea’ that stops one 'believing' the illusion, then one becomes free of it. This books show us how we can become free of it and shows us how it is just an idea in our heads. The books looks at how we hold onto our suffering for security and certainty purposes and that by letting go of it we would be free. However what prevents us from letting go is that we think it will reveal our so called badness; and so the suffering in a sense is confirmation we are trying to be good but are really bad. The book encourages to break free of this cycle. It is this whole self destructive process that needs to be seen as a mere figment of ones imagination and not the absolute reality of our life. It is this we have mistaken to be true that creates the illusion. This book is helpful for everyone because there are things in it that relate to most people's states of mind. This book as lead me to read people like J Krishnamurti, Eckhart Tolle, Buddhist teachings etc. Another great book for everyone (if one wants to understand the reactions in the mind) is Pure Power: How to Achieve World Peace and Happiness by James Christopher.
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