Never let them see you cry.
That used to be your motto — tears
can be so inappropriate, right? —
but these days, you can’t help crying and you don’t
know why.
Maybe it’s the economy that’s
got you down. Certainly job and money stresses aren’t helping. Family
obligations are overwhelming, and your confidence level is kaput. Your spouse
keeps wondering what’s wrong, and you wish you could say. Worse, everybody
thinks you should just “snap out of it.”
When you’re experiencing
depression, that’s just not possible, says Stephen S. Ilardi, Ph.D., and in his
new book “The Depression Cure,” he has hope for sufferers and their families.
In his research and his work
with patients diagnosed with depression, Stephen Ilardi noticed something
fascinating: modern day hunter-gatherer bands have few, if any, incidences of
depression. Conversely, the rate of depression in industrialized society has
steadily risen to the point where fully 25 percent of us are at risk in our
lifetimes.
Ilardi says he finally
realized that our bodies and our minds weren’t created for the lifestyles that
most of us have today. In addition to bad eating habits and lack of physical
activity, we’ve become a society of stuck indoors, sleep deprived loners. These
things, says Ilardi, contribute to the crushing pain of depression.
But why do some people
bounce back from adversity and others don’t? Their genes have something to do with it, Ilardi says. Child
abuse and trauma certainly are factors, as is gender (women are twice as likely
to be depressed) and lifestyle. Another major hallmark of depression is a mind
consumed by ruminating, runaway thoughts.
So you think you might have
the symptoms of depression. What can you do?
In this book, Ilardi
outlines six steps you can take to overcome depression, whether you’ve tried
drugs or not, whether they’ve worked for you or not, in a method he calls TLC
(Therapeutic Lifestyle Change).
The steps are simple to
implement; you might even be doing some of them already. Even if you aren’t a
depression sufferer, you can follow Ilardi’s TLC program, too.
And in case you missed it in
the introduction, there — finally, on page 216 — is the disclaimer
you need to read: see your doctor first. Tell your physician what you have in
mind — particularly in regard to dietary supplements — and get
clearance before you start any kind of program.
Lagging disclaimer and
mega-dosing supplements aside, “The Depression Cure” is intriguing. Ilardi
seems to be onto something when he points out that our ancestors didn’t sit at
a desk all day and fight traffic to go home stressed out. Other researchers
have offered support for some of what Ilardi is claiming, albeit not together
in a six-step method.
I think, overall, this book
worth checking out, but with caution. Even Ilardi says there is no
one-size-fits-all fix for what ails ya.
Pick up a copy of “The
Depression Cure.” With your doctor’s blessing, a fair amount of effort and this
book, “snapping out of it” might just be a snap.
“The Depression Cure”
by Stephen S. Ilardi, PhD, c.2009, DaCapo LifeLong,
$25.00, 289 pages