Malignant Sadness: The Anatomy of Depression

Malignant Sadness: The Anatomy of Depression lives up to its title, explaining the state of our knowledge and enlightening bystanders who have never been crippled by psychic pain about intense unhappiness. Wolpert's training as a developmental biologist helps him sift through the scientific literature, while his devastating episode of depression is the base of his descriptions of its subjective experience.

Given his background, one would expect Wolpert to emphasise biological causes and relief, but he gives psychological and environmental factors their due. As anyone with a debilitating disease will agree, any course of action promising recovery is worth pursuing, and Malignant Sadness carefully looks into many alternate explanations and show more therapies. Evolution, psychotherapy, Prozac and its ilk, and non-Western medicine all play roles in Wolpert's drama, and his engaging prose keeps the reader intrigued throughout

Depression is to sadness what cancer is to normal cell division, says Wolpert. Hence "malignant sadness," or depression, is sadness gone out of control. After a brief and moving description of his own experience with "malignant sadness," Wolpert takes a brief walk through contemporary knowledge of depression, then embarks on a detailed discussion of how depression is defined in the psychiatric handbook, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. In two provocative chapters, Wolpert discusses whether depression is a malady specific to the West, or whether it is found in all societies around the world (in general, his answer is that it exists in non-Western cultures but that there it tends to be expressed in physical rather than emotional symptoms). In a very thorough section on who is susceptible to depression, he rattles off the results of study after study with little examination; some of the findings are familiar (women are more susceptible to depression than men), others less so (postpartum depression has been found in cultures as different as Malaysia, Japan and Brazil). show less

I saw a reference to this book in an Amazon review of another book on the same subject, and managed to borrow it from the library. It is a book on depression by an academic and scientist who became interested in the subject when he suffered a period of very bad depression himself. He made a television series about depression a few years ago, which was very interesting too.

The title of the book comes from the author's belief that depression is sadness that has turned malignant (in the same way that cancer is cell division turned malignant). He discusses how depression affects the sufferer and how it manifests differently in different cultures, then looks at psychological and biological explanations for the disease. This is followed by a show more description of the various drugs and forms of psychotherapy available, and the surprising fact that they all seem to work about as well as each other. show less

This book was a great overview of all the different theories of causes of and treatments for depression, written by someone who has experienced the condition first hand. It is interesting to note that overall, psychotherapy and drug therapy have about the same success rate. There are viable theories all over the place- but most likely it is some of everything.

I learned that sometimes stressful events are never encoded in the conscious memory due to too much steroid being released which causes the hippocampus to fail to function properly, and anxiety can be left over in our implicit memory from these events. This is one reason a person can feel anxiety without knowing why.

This was easy to read and very informative—good for a layman, I think. I like how it coves depression in the non-Western world as well.

This is a very good book on depression because it discusses the subject from two viewpoints. The author has suffered depression so can speak from experience, but as a doctor and researcher can also talk about it from a medical and scientific viewpoint. Different theories on the cause of depression are discussed as well as various treatments. Also depression in other cultures other than western are presented.

A fairly dry but readable account of the state of research and thinking on depressive illnesses.

Informatief en niet larmoyant relaas van het ervaren van een depressie, en de zoektocht naar het ontstaan ervan