Overview
Depression is not a disease of the brain, a genetic disability or even a mood disorder. Rather, shutdown, numbness or sadness are non-pathological adaptations to adverse childhood and adult environments. This challenging book thus understands depression as a wise response to an unliveable situation. It can teach us what is wrong with our lives and what we must learn in order to go beyond symptom relief and reconnect to our most fundamental needs, relational, existential and spiritual. Because moods shape how we engage with our outer and inner worlds, they underlie all human behaviour. If the sociocultural world is toxic or frustrates our core needs, we will withdraw to protect ourselves. Those who have encountered a non-facilitating environment in childhood will be even more sensitive to adult stresses, since their self-organisation is fragile and non-resilient. As depression is so complex, understanding it demands an integrative approach. Adopting a biopsychosocial perspective with an environmentalist emphasis, this study articulates a variety of levels: experiential, psychodynamic, developmental, evolutionary, neuroscientific, genetic and societal. In particular the impacts of the social changes in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are invoked in an attempt to explain the ongoing escalation of depression worldwide.
Full Product Details
Author: Barbara Dowds
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
Imprint: Karnac Books
Weight: 0.408kg
ISBN: 9781782205906
ISBN 10: 178220590
Pages: 336
Publication Date: 31 October 2017
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Tertiary & Higher Education
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Reviews
Barbara Dowds brings a wealth of disciplinary perspectives to the subject of depression. Alongside analysing 21 published memoirs of depression, and sensitively demonstrating depression's many nuances, she threads in relevant psychotherapeutic theory, and discusses a biopsychosocial model rooted in early life experiences. Dowds concisely presents evolutionary, neuroscience, genetic, epigenetic and microbiological factors. Linking these foci with social breakdown phenomena, she examines depression as a disorder of the self. This book is surely one of the most passionate, intelligent and hopeful contributions to our understanding of an accelerating modern epidemic. It deserves the attention of all mental health professionals, social scientists and enquiring individuals. Colin Feltham, Emeritus Professor, Sheffield Hallam University. His most recent works are Feltham, C. (2017) Depressive Realism: Interdisciplinary Perspectivesã (Routledge) and Sarraf, M., Woodley of Menie, M. & Feltham, C. (forthcoming) Modernity, Nihilism and Mental Health (Routledge)ã ã This book's deep, multifaceted exploration of depression challenges our current thinking. For Barbara Dowds, depression is not so much about 'mood' or genes as it is about the problem of getting innate human needs met. Dowds is equally at home whether she is discussing this in terms of early child development, a loss of connection with others or altered physical sense of self, or depression as the lurking underbelly of our narcissistic and materialistic society. I admire her wide reach and agree with her that the growing epidemic of depression requires social change as well as individual support. Sue Gerhardt, author of Why Love Matters (Routledge) and The Selfish Society (Simon & Schuster)
Author Information
Barbara Dowds, PhD, is a humanistic and integrative psychotherapist in the Dublin area. She teaches on the BSc in counselling and psychotherapy and is director of the MA in integrative psychotherapy in the Personal Counselling Institute (PCI College). For seven years she was on the editorial board of the Irish psychotherapy journal, 'Eisteach'. Barbara was a senior lecturer in molecular genetics at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, until 2002 when she changed careers and began practising as a psychotherapist.
