Ackerman, Diane - A Slender Thread: Rediscovering Hope at the Heart of Crisis

Diane Ackerman recounts her experience as a counselor for a suicide and crisis hotline, along with various musings on the nature of the human animal and how our states of crisis are somewhat reminiscent to animal states of crisis.

I picked this up mostly to see what sort of advice counselors gave to the callers; from a very practical standpoint, I felt as though I should see how the professionals did it. Ackerman doesn't so much focus on this; the book is more of a meditation on crisis and suicide, along with a chronicle of her own feelings of helplessness and weariness, and also of hope. I wasn't quite as impressed with her meditations on nature as I was in her A Natural History of the Senses, although I did very much appreciate the speculation on drunk squirrels and roadkill.

Er, I can't remember what it had to do with suicide hotlines, but come on! Drunk squirrels!

I am easily amused.

Anyhow, I didn't get as much practical advice as I wanted, but I liked the look behind the scenes and the feel that all these anonymous people out there suffering had somewhere to turn to.

Kramer, Peter D. - Against Depression

fannishly had this sitting around, and then her therapist recced it, so, here I am.

Kramer begins the book by explaining that nearly every single talk he's given about depression and depression medication has someone in the audience raising his/her hand and asking, "Well, what about Van Gogh?" The book is mainly to dispell the gulf between medical knowledge of depression versus common perception of what depression is and why people still believe it is an essential part of the human condition and/or a contributing factor to genius.

Kramer does a very convincing job detailing why depression is indeed a disease and why it should be eradicated. He manages to go into medical details on how depression damages the brain, especially the hippocampus, how it increases the risk for heart attacks, and in general how much damage it does to the body. He also managed to scare the heck out of me! I was reading and basically decided that I needed to go find a therapist rightthissecond, because I like my brain! I want to keep it healthy! Also, hardening arteries and minor strokes and all that jazz very not good!

Anyhow, I found this very convincing, but I also don't have enough medical background or general background on depression to really be able to evaluate how well he presents current research. It seemed to be fairly balanced, and he does remark that many of the studies he cites aren't conclusive.

He does discuss several things that rung true with me though -- take with a grain of salt, of course. He mentions that with some of his patients, when they hit baseline or normal or the undepressed state, whatever it's called, they know it. They feel fully themselves again, even if they've been suffering from depression for a very long time. I remember finally hitting baseline for the first time in two years in March and how right it felt, how I had no doubts that this is how I was supposed to feel. It's that more than anything that convinced me that depression is a disease, not the way the body and mind normally operate.

Of course, all Kramer's chapters on how the depressed mind and body looks very different from a healthy body in terms of resilience and health were also very convincing! And he also mentions something that I found very interesting, that depression is basically a disease that affects the body and mind's resilience. A depressed brain repairs damaged neurons and neuron casing (glial cells) much more slowly than a healthy brain; depression similarly hardens blood vessels and makes them more susceptible to rupture and blockage, ergo the heightened risks of stroke and heart disease. Kramer correlated this cellular susceptibility to damage with the depressed person's mental and psychological lack of resilience. I can't say on a scientific level how true that is, but it personally rings true.

An end to depression, he argues, would mean a return to "normal" functioning on a cellular level, along with psychological resilience. The gist of the book seems to be that while feeling sadness and grief and pain is part of the human condition and contributes to art and such, depression occurs when the body and the mind cannot bounce back from such emotions.

Anyhow, I probably didn't need much convincing with regard to such points, but it was convincing all the same. Highly recommended.