Thursday, September 17, 2009

Five best books on depression

In 2005 Mike Wallace, correspondent for CBS's 60 Minutes, named a five best list of books on depression for the Wall Street Journal.

One title on the list:
"How You Can Survive When They're Depressed" by Anne Sheffield (Harmony Books, 1998).

I was first hit with depression more than 20 years ago during the time of a highly publicized libel trial against CBS, which happily ended in our favor. (I was hit again about 12 years ago, when I turned 75 and figured that I didn't really need the Zoloft I'd been told to stay on for the rest of my life.) One of the first books I read back in the 1980s was Ann Sheffield's, aimed at helping the friends and family of depressives. I was lower than a snake's belly, and my wife, Mary, was suffering because of it. Ms. Sheffield describes, stage by stage, how depressives affect others around them. The wife of one depressed man told her: "At night I take my book into another room so as not to have to look at him reading the same Tom Clancy thriller over and over.... I hate being home with him because I really hate looking at him."
Read about another book on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue