Book Review: “What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Depression”
It’s not been a good time for me trying to find good books about depression. I keep hitting duds. What’s really annoying is these authors get their crap published, while I’m slogging away ten hours a day as a professional writer trying to get accurrate and helpful web content.
Case in point: Just a couple of weeks ago, I picked up What Your Doctor May Net Tell You About Depression: The Breakthrough Integrative Approach for Effective Treatment by Michael Schachter and Deborah Mitchell. You already should be worried about any book that has a title longer than your inner thigh.
Yes, It Sucks
This travesty in between book covers is reprehensible for many reasons. Get back and relax while we go through the pile:
- It’s boring. That’s unforgiveable in and of itself.
- Trees had to be killed to make the boring book. Somewhere, in an alternative universe, trees are writing bad books on paper made from human innards.
- It claims that your doctor doesn’t want you to get better. This is a scare tactic used by people who want to sell really boring books with incredibly long titles. Considering how overworked doctors are, they want to cure you as quickly as possible just so they can stop putting in twenty hour days.
- Antidepressants are seen to be used only as a last resource. Before that, you need to go on a diet and take alot of supplements — which will wind up costing you a lot more than a round of Prozac. Besides, when you have major depression, you have no incentive to eat right. If poor diet is the cuase of major depression, then why aren’t everyone who is on a diet happy as little larks?
- In order to follow the “breaklthrough integrative program”, you have to find a specialist in a brand-new type of medicine with a name you’ve never heard of (orthomolecularism) and, chances are, your doctor has never heard of, either. In other words, this book is nothing but a 416 page advertisement for his services.
- The paper isn’t absorbant enough to make decent toilet tissue.
Pass!
You’re much better off listening to your doctor, taking your meds and reading the Sunday Comics or William Styron’s Darkness Visible rather than this book. If you read it, then you’ll be more depressed than ever.
November 18th, 2008 at 7:59 pm
[...] Disease and Depression by Rena Sherwood One of the points that the book I shredded yesterday was trying to make is that many people are misdiagnosed with major depression or bipolar disorder. [...]