Product Description

While recognizing that in its most extreme forms depression is best treated through pharmaceutical and psychoanalytical intervention, Curtiss argues convincingly that most people can control the syndrome without the use of drugs and without the burden of endless therapy. To illustrate this, she draws from her own experiences with depression, anecdotes from her practice, and a wealth of information about the history of the treatment of depression. This helpful book encourages those people to take responsibility for their symptoms, and gives them the steps they need to fight and win the battle against depression.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #486818 in Books
• Published on: 2001-10-03
• Released on: 2001-10-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 496 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In overwritten, overlong text, Curtiss (Time of the Wild), a cognitive behavioral therapist, author of children's books and contributing writer to the New York Times, etc., explains how to overcome depression without drugs. The suggestions herein stem chiefly from her personal experience: her periods of deep depression, followed by manic incidents that led her, for example, to launch poorly conceived business ventures that lost money. She also, somewhat capriciously, left her husband and children for a year to live in an ashram. She explains how she freed herself from years of ups and downs by following her own program of "directed thinking." According to Curtiss, as soon as one becomes aware of depressed or manic feelings, one must "as an act of will, replace the accidental, unchosen thoughts that have caused the problem with new, positive, neutral or commonsense thoughts or actions." Even in cases resulting from chemical imbalances in the brain, contends Curtiss, it's simply a question of learning how to employ the mind. She feels strongly that prescription drugs coupled with "psychologized thinking" (i.e. the Freudian premise that "the mind and the self... are one and the same") will only mask, not help with depression. Curtiss also emphasizes the importance of traditional family values versus the current pursuit of individual happiness. However one feels about Curtiss's ideas, "directed thought" comes off as a murky offshoot of standard therapy; wading through the author's convoluted thought processes may cause rather than cure depression. Radio interviews.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
A number of recent self-help titles enable sufferers to try cognitive behavioral techniques, including Joseph Luciani's Self-Coaching: How To Heal Anxiety and Depression (LJ 4/15/01). Kaplan and Turkington's Making the Antidepressant Decision is a new edition of their Making the Prozac Decision (Lowell House, 1994). The name change accurately reflects the work's coverage of all current antidepressant medications as well as indications for taking them and their side effects. While most of this edition isn't new, a few very important additions make it worth the low price, including a discussion of the newest Prozac-like drug, Celexa, and a chapter on St. John's Wort. Recommended for public libraries. Mary Ann Hughes, Neill P.L., Pullman, WA
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Although never diagnosed with depression, since childhood Curtiss has suffered depression-like problems, which she describes in detail. She also explains why she refused drugs. The most engaging aspects of her long book are her accounts of her experiences and of the growth in awareness that led her to "Directed Thinking," the major goal of which is to control not depression but one's reaction to depression; not to find fault (a culpable condition) but to find a remedy consisting of mental processes to employ as soon as the first twinges of depression appear. Developing such processes is a choice, hence the title of Curtiss' hortatory book, which probably will rouse discussion among caregivers, patients, and drug companies. William Beatty
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Interesting concept, but terrible book
I am giving this two stars because I think it merits an extra one for making the radical statement that depression and manic-depression can be managed without drugs. I do agree that many people get trapped in self-defeating cycles of depression and mania, which could probably be broken if they allowed it as a possibility. However, I think that she veers close to Tom Cruise territory, claiming that anyone who resorts to antidepressants is "weak". I've dealt with depression since childhood, but at this point I can't tell if it was genetic or if I just learned the habits and continued to reinforce them in myself into adulthood. It may be a question of the chicken or the egg here. Ultimately I don't think it matters and I tend to agree with the author that cognitive-behavioral therapy can help and that there isn't any proof of such a thing as "chemical imbalance" causing mental illness. There isn't. The fact that brains of depressed people are different than brains of "healthy" people doesn't prove that something organic within the person's body caused the depression. It could just as well be the opposite, that it is the depression that changes the brain.

What bothered me most about this book, though, is that I tried reading it twice more than a year apart and both times got extremely bored by about halfway through the book. Reading about the stupid, rude or irresponsible things the author did before she figured out that she could manage her own mania and depression was not helpful to me in the least. The redundant writing style cried out desperately for an editor. The author also sounded tediously self-aggrandizing as well, leading me to believe that she was in one of her admitted fits of mania when she wrote it. In short, if she's trying to convince anyone that they can stabilize their own moods and emotions, her book should seem like she has done so for herself.

I'd love to see a book like this in the hands of an author who didn't feel the need to go on for hundreds of pages about herself, as I think the book contains a good idea. The poor execution here makes me unable to recommend the book to anyone else.

Frighteningly Biased
I came to look at this book after reading the Author's review of "The Best Awful" by Carrie Fisher. Fisher's book is about a disasterous trip into mania, followed by a suicidal depression that lands her in the mental hospital... _because she went off of her medication_. The author of this book writes the following in her review: "The remarkable thing is that in a culture where manic depression is encouraged by psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies who have formed an unholy, if unwitting, alliance; here's some one who has escaped. Not unscathed, mind you. But free nevertheless.". This statement captured a level of bias that really frightened me. What kind of "freedom" involves running blindly through alleyways in Tijuana, bleeding, fleeing, high on opiates and a crashing mania? Or crashing into a stupor, spending days at a time staring at the wall while your child cries, wondering where her mother went, until your friends drag you away to a mental hospital? Sure, maybe some people, like the author, feel that life is just fine that way -- but I'm sure a lot of people _don't_.

For me personally, finding medication that stopped my bipolar moodswings WAS THE BEST THING THAT HAS EVER HAPPENED TO ME IN MY ENTIRE LIFE. No amount of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy could "fix" me, until I was in enough control of my moods to actually think reasonably, with a coherent understanding that didn't reverse direction every week. In the author's bio, she speaks of having "left her husband and children for a year to live in an ashram". I couldn't get close to having a husband -- no one ever wanted to stay with me longer than a year; I was too unstable, violent to myself and others. I was not "forced" into taking medication; I went searching for it after years of struggling and failed therapy. It was only after starting medication that I could possibly begin to get back in control of my life.

I am absolutely certain that the techniques mentioned in this book can help cope with depression; cognitive-behavioral therapy is wonderful this way, and I have found it greatly useful _once I started medication_. But 'throw the medicine out the door; it's just being pushed on you by money-grubbing multinational corporations' is a frighteningly biased viewpoint that can be very dangerous (as in Fisher's "The Best Awful"), or even fatal
to people with very real, serious mood disorders, for which there is ample biochemical and genetic evidence that something deeper than behavior has gone wrong.

The choice to be on or to forgo medication is not one to make based on bias. It must be made by knowing what works for you. If taken entirely to heart, this book could save the lives of some people. What I am afraid of is the damage it could cause to others, who are not as strong and capable of controlling the chaos of bipolar disorder as the author is.

The Power of Directed Thinking
First, the bad news. Arline B. Curtiss could be described as a political reactionary. She's nostalgic for the Good Old Days before "the abandonment of principle in favor of feelings" brought on by the so-called Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. She admires Dr. Laura Schlessinger. She holds the Sixties--and mainstream psychology--responsible for infantilizing us, stripping us of our dignity, turning us into a "Culture Dump society".

I don't share Curtiss' political views. Dr. Laura makes me gag, and I don't believe there ever was a time when America was all about Virtue, Character, and Community--for better or worse, the United States has always been, right from the very start, among the most fiercely competitive and individualistic (and therefore least communal) of modern nations. The "free love" movement and modern psychiatric movement may have *exacerbated* this tendency to self-absorption, but clearly they did not initiate it.

But having said that, I can't help but admire and appreciate certain portions of Curtiss' book. Curtiss at least refuses to see anti-depressants as the *only* solution to depression. There's nothing wrong with interpreting the condition as a biochemical imbalance, but why does the pharmaceutical approach have to be the *only* approach? Isn't there anything else to be said about the matter? Curtiss thinks so, and though I have some strong misgivings about her book, she makes some legitimate points.

Take her quote from Goethe: "Where a man has a passion for meditation without the capacity for thinking, a particular idea fixes itself fast, and soon creates a mental disease." Without taking away from Solomon, Redfield Jamison, Styron, et al., I I do think Curtiss raises a real issue, not a false one. We're living in the Information Age--thus we all, by necessity, must "meditate" upon the world--as castaways afloat upon a buffeting, roiling sea of data--and yet, at the same time, the quality of our liberal arts education couldn't possibly sink any lower than it is now. In other words, we're all forced to be "meditators" now, yet fewer and fewer of us are capable of being "thinkers" in the sense Goethe was a thinker, because of the very real and very drastic decline of liberal arts education all over the western world. Seen in this light, the skyrocketing rates of depression in industrialized nations seem much more explainable. Curtiss' other bugbear is Freud. She writes, "People say Freud's influence is waning. But it is Freud's theory of the unconscious mind that provides the only basis for mental illness as we know it. Without Freud's theory of the unconscious mind, we could not have the 'diseases' of drug addiction, manic depression, social phobia, or frotteurism."

These are some of the reasons Curtiss provides for the rising rates of depression. Her solution is something she calls Directed Thinking, which is based on the premise that we can only think one thought at a time. Modern science shows that the emotions and instincts associated with depression are active in the sub-cortex or "lower brain"--by stimulating our neo-cortex or "higher brain" (which involves the cognitive faculties of reasoning, math, language, etc.) we can direct our attention away from our negative feelings and the pain caused by depression. ("Depression always ends. Not because of Prozac. Not because of psychotherapy. Not because of psychotherapy or shock treatments. Depression always ends because it is in the very nature of depression to end. The only question is, how can we get it to end sooner?")

But isn't The Power of Directed Thinking just The Power of Positive Thinking all over again? Yes and no. Curtiss, unlike Peale, doesn't view "positive" thinking as entirely the right way to go. Instead of willing yourself to be happy (which could easily backfire and remind you with added force just how *unhappy* you presently are, thus compounding your misery), Curtiss suggests you pick a neutral thought, almost anything will do. She also emphasizes process rather than content. Reading a book or memorizing a poem would probably focus one's attention away from the anguish more effectively than channel-surfing the TV, simply because the former activities make more strenuous use of the neo-cortex. Though she obviously dislikes Kay Redfield Jamison's books, Curtiss' notions are quite similar. Jamison has described in detail how "for many artists, writing or painting or composing has provided an escape from their turmoils and melancholy." Thus depression (more specifically manic-depression) and artistic talent are intertwined phenomena. Jamison believes "creative work can act not only as a means of escape from pain, but also as a way of structuring chaotic emotions and thoughts, numbing pain through abstraction and the rigors of disciplined thought, and creating a distance from the source of despair." Despite her dislike of Jamision, Curtiss in fact says much the same thing. But she says it in a different way. It is the neo-cortex, the "higher mind," that enables human beings to "structure chaotic emotions," and to utilize "abtraction" and "disciplined thought." It's the sub-cortex, the instinctive and fearful "lower mind" that is the "source of despair" in the brain. According to Curtiss, everyone can learn to make more precise use of his or her neo-cortex, while at the same time taming the demons unleashed by the sub-cortex. You don't have to be an artist; anyone can learn to do this. Hence, her title: DEPRESSION IS A CHOICE.

Since reading this book, I've found that Directed Thinking does indeed work for me--not perfectly, but it does help keep the demons at bay. I understand why some people hate the book, but I would still recommend it as an alternative Yang to Jamison's Yin. I don't recommend anyone chuck their Prozac in the garbage, but what's wrong with exploring other techniques for combatting this most horrendous of experiences? Drugs are an answer, but they're not foolproof, they don't work for absolutely everybody, and they'd probably work more effectively in combination with other therapies, like this one.