Rethinking Depression

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Dr. Eric Maisel invites depression sufferers and their service providers to consider whether human sadness has been monetized into the disease of depression and asks readers to consider the personal implications of this fifty-year cultural shift from 'human problem' to 'medical ailment.' In Rethinking Depression, Dr. Maisel introduces a brand new therapy, existential cognitive-behavioural therapy (ECBT), for working with this common human condition - something that he does not believe should be labeled a medical condition in many cases. ECBT is the first therapy to marry the proven methods of cognitive-behavioural therapy with the powerful meaning-based orientation of existential therapy. Dr. Maisel explains that ECBT is the method for dealing with depression, whether the thing in question is sadness or whether it is depression.

The book does two important things: it disputes the prevailing view that depression is a disease and it introduces an important new therapy, one long overdue. If it did just one of these two things it would be an important book. That it does both makes it an exceptional book with the power to transform the treatment of depression and dramatically improve the delivery of therapy.

To acknowledge the reality of unhappiness is not to assert the centrality of unhappiness. In fact, it is just the opposite. By taking the common human experience of unhappiness out of the shadows and acknowledging its existence, we begin to reduce its power. The gloom can lift. It may lift of its own accord - or it may lift because you have a strong existential program in place where you pay more attention to your intentions than to your mood. It is just this type of program that Dr. Maisel's book will help readers create.