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The Mindful Way through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness |  | Authors: Mark Williams, John Teasdale, Zindel Segal, Jon Kabat-Zinn
Publisher: The Guilford Press
Category: Book
List Price: $19.95
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Seller: pbshop
Rating:  76 reviews
Sales Rank: 1000
Media: Paperback
Pages: 273
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.8
ISBN: 1593851286
Dewey Decimal Number: 362.25
EAN: 9781593851286
ASIN: 1593851286
Publication Date: June 2, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
If you’ve ever struggled with depression, take heart. Mindfulness, a simple yet powerful way of paying attention to your most difficult emotions and life experiences, can help you break the cycle of chronic unhappiness once and for all. In The Mindful Way through Depression, four uniquely qualified experts explain why our usual attempts to “think” our way out of a bad mood or just “snap out of it” lead us deeper into the downward spiral. Through insightful lessons drawn from both Eastern meditative traditions and cognitive therapy, they demonstrate how to sidestep the mental habits that lead to despair, including rumination and self-blame, so you can face life’s challenges with greater resilience. Jon Kabat-Zinn gently and encouragingly narrates the accompanying CD of guided meditations, making this a complete package for anyone seeking to regain a sense of hope and well-being.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 76
 If you ever get depressed or get caught up in negative thinking, , you need to read this! January 10, 2008
KV Trout (Los Angeles, CA USA)
177 out of 181 found this review helpful
This is truly an excellent method of working to accept and overcome the problems of depression.
I have read some of the classic books on depression and cognitive therapy such as David Burns' "Feeling Good", and this is a much more comprehensive approach, based on the principles of cognitive therapy but with the addition of mindfulness.
This approach is also good for people who aren't really clinically depressed but who get caught up in negative thinking patterns and low self esteem: "Why me?" "I'm a loser", "I'll never get ahead", etc...
The book has a great cd with it to teach you exactly how to practice the mindfulness exercises. I hesitate to use the term meditation because people tend to start thinking things like "I can't meditate", "It's too hard", etc... By the time you read the book, you will understand that meditation is not hard at all, it's just a matter of doing it, and it can be done in as little as 3-5 minutes and still be worthwhile. It's not a matter of "contemplating your navel" but rather just learning to BE in the present moment, to watch one's thoughts arise and fall away, to slow down, to look at what is happening in one's body and in one's mind. Nothing at all difficult about it. You can do it. And you will find it worthwhile if you do it for a few weeks.
I highly recommend this book to people suffering from depression.
Another very good book for certain types of depression and anxiety that I highly recommend is "Emotional Blackmail" by Susan Forward, which helped me a great deal.
One more book I will recommend not so much specifically for depression but because it teaches the value and technique of "mindfulness", is Jon Kabat-Zinn's "Wherever You Go, There You Are".
The last thing I will say is that just reading any of these books is not enough! You MUST do the exercises and put mindfulness into practice! You will be glad you did!
The Mindful Way through Depression September 3, 2007
Gary G. Miles (Nashville, TN)
264 out of 275 found this review helpful
I highly recommend this book. I have suffered from depressed for a long time, and I am always looking for new ways to cope with my depression. I found this book to be most helpful in describing useful techniques to deal with my depression. The book is written in very layman language and is easily understandable. To my knowledge the four professionals who wrote this book collaborated their ideas, and came up with a scheme that was relatively easy to follow. I take anti-depressant medications that enable me to get up to "base line", but after that, if I do not have some way of facing every day problems, I find myself in the dump of depression again.
This book helps me to stay up, and not slip back too far into depression. Medications are very helpful, but by themselves, they can not keep one at base line (or what some people call "normal.") Once we reach base line, we depressed persons, need help in staying at that level. The teachings of this book definitely has helped me in this endeavor.
I do not say this book totally cured me of depression (I don't think anything ever will.) However, the information in the book has been a big help to me, and I can cope with depression much better than I did before I read the book.
Waking Up to Your Life Again: A Brilliant Guide to Understanding Depression September 5, 2008
Enamorato (Washington, DC United States)
100 out of 102 found this review helpful
I was actually led to seek out information on meditation as a treatment for depression through a book called Surviving America's Depression Epidemic by psychologist Bruce E. Levine. That book takes a highly insightful approach to investigating the sociological and personal genesis for depression and I credit it for saving me from succumbing to this condition. Later, I bought "The Mindful Way through Depression" to supplement Levine's more brief explanation of meditation as a therapeutic modality.
This book is the work of three psychologists - Mark Williams, John Teasdale and Zindel Segal - investigating why people who became depressed once would experience constant relapse even after treatment. They were eventually led to the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts Medical School on the benefits of meditation for stress reduction. The approach they created together is called Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), which begins with the understanding of human psychology of the Buddhist contemplative traditions of India.
Like Dr. Levine, the authors of this book redefine depression -- not as some inherent chemical or genetic fault that needs to be eradicated with psychotropic drugs -- but as a habitual pattern of reactivity against our unpleasant emotions. In Chapter 2, they provide a brilliant, nuanced portrait of depression which is not a monolithic entity, but is composed of patterns of physical sensations, memories, thought-patterns and behaviors. Depressed individuals are often familiar with contractions in the abdomen or chest ("butterflies"), lethargy, rigidity or heaviness, etc. These sensations in turn evoke memories of feeling similarly in the past. Those memories in turn evoke thought patterns associated with those memories; perhaps thoughts that you were worthless, or that the world itself is a harsh place. These thought patterns influence our behavior. All of this gets ingrained into our mind-body complex and can become a habitual pattern that we fall into time and again.
The aim of MBCT is to (1) become aware of how this pattern operates and (2) use that awareness to dismantle that pattern. The tool for developing such awareness is mindfulness meditation, which the authors define as "paying attention on purpose and nonjudgmentally, in the present moment." The suspension of judgment is of particular importance. Taking a poignant insight from Buddhist psychology, the authors realized that much of our suffering is due to an aversion towards our own unpleasant experiences. Many people construe "curing" depression with banishing all unpleasant emotions. However, this is neither possible nor desirable. Feelings -- both the pleasant and unpleasant -- are important messengers that convey vital information about ourselves and our lives. However, when depressed, we often become paralyzed by our unwillingness to be with our fear, regret, anger, anxiety, etc. By developing a more nonjudgmental attitude toward our emotions, we can eventually see that we are bigger than our depressed emotions and thoughts and learn not to be so overwhelmed by them. I can't really explain exactly how different this feels, but it felt like being a kid again: awakening to the newness of each and every moment, as a child experiences the world, is really the heart of mindfulness.
I was glad to see that MBCT addresses some of the shortcomings of traditional CBT that Levine criticizes in his book. CBT is preoccupied with thoughts specifically - neglecting the nuanced relationship between our external circumstances, emotions, thoughts and behaviors. Likewise, I found CBT to be exhausting. Who can stand to analyze their thoughts constantly, especially without an understanding of where those thoughts are coming from? The mindfulness practices in this book place thoughts in the wider context of life itself and bring us out of our own heads. This also explains why we often sink deeper into depression the more we try to "think" our way out or just "snap out of it." In doing so, we more strongly identify with the pattern itself and get sucked back into its workings. At worst, these attempts only serve to further estrange us from our emotions or cause us to start ruminating, cementing our depressed thoughts. At best, they serve only as a cosmetic and temporary solution.
Buddhists will likely recognize many of the techniques used here, most of which are adaptations of vipassana (insight) meditation. The program incorporates a "body scan" meditation adapted from satipatthana (establishment of mindfulness) practices, three meditations on the breath, the body, and thoughts/sounds adapted from anapanasati (mindfulness of the breath), and an "emotional barometer" technique that is based on a Buddhist teaching on emotional quality called vedana. None of this is mentioned in the book. Despite its Buddhist milieu, the authors have kept the practice completely secular. There is no mention of Buddhist concepts such as anatman, dharma or nirvana. The authors do a good job of keeping the aim squarely on freedom from chronic unhappiness. The explanations are simple and user-friendly, as well as tempered with modern science.
If you are currently depressed, this may all sound quite dubious. I myself was skeptical. But having nothing to lose, I read through the book, practiced the meditations as described and suspended judgment for the eight weeks recommended by the authors. Within the first two weeks, it started making more sense. My days feel longer and more varied. I started noticing tiny details like where I hold tension in the body, when I needlessly and repetitively feed anxieties with negative thoughts, and started to notice things in the world around me more. The book's insights into the workings of the mind and emotion are remarkable and well-supported by research. The CD narrated by Kabat-Zinn is extremely helpful in setting up a regimented practice and commitment to yourself to get better. If you are also interested in learning about depression as a cultural, sociological and historical phenomenon, I highly recommend Bruce Levine's "Surviving America's Depression Epidemic" which touches on topics not dealt with here.
EDIT: April 18, 2010 - Periodically, I revise my reviews and I thought readers might appreciate an update on this one. Since writing this review almost two years ago, I have continued to benefit from this book and have not had a major relapse since completing the program. I am grateful every day that the authors of this book put my life back in my own hands again.
Groundbreaking approach October 9, 2007
David Fahrland (Northeastern Ohio)
126 out of 132 found this review helpful
This is a ground-breaking method in the treatment of depression by combining C.B.T. with Buddhist mindfulness practice. The descriptions and exercises for meditating have helped me to overcome my resistance(s) to practice. I also have discovered "moving meditation" that can be done with walking, swimming, whatever to reach a result that is even more enlightening than classic sitting meditation practice.
I also realize from my past deep depressions that any practice seems hard because it is extremely difficult to overcome "inertia" and cut through the cognitive "fog" symptoms that accompany the disease. Hopefully, the moving meditation practice and some simple cognitive practices described here could be effective even under the duress of a full blown relapse.
This book is also very well written and clearly readable.
VERY DIFFERENT September 17, 2007
Laura Hughes (Champaign, IL)
102 out of 113 found this review helpful
This book is very different from most books on depression that I have read and there have been many. Most of the books try and help you worry your way through depression. This book says you need to think about other things and realize that everybody is depressed at one time or another but they don't start thinking of themselves as a depressed person. This is one of the worse things you can do. It gives you breathing exercise, to try and live in the moment instead of always feeling bad about the past or worrying about the future. Just that much has helped me. There is cd that goes along with some of the teaching exercises which is very helpful in fact I don't know of too many books that have a cd to go with it or a cd that has a book that goes with it. This book and "Magnificent Addiction" are the 2 best books I have read that help with depression and anxiety. Addictions can many many things including being addicted to depression and anxiety.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 76
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