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 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. ( )

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 ( )

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. ( )