Depression: The Evolution of Powerlessness

by Paul A. Gilbert

Bringing the reader up to date on current research and theory, this volume presents an ambitious overview of the various psychological approaches to understanding and treating depression. Part I explores the major distinctions among all types of depression, including discussion of seasonal affective disorder, postnatal depression, and depression in children. A chapter on epidemiology covers issues of prevalence, relapse, long-term outcome, and chronic depression. In addition, the relationship between depression and the personality disorders is examined in detail.

Genres: Psychology

576 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1992

Reviews

[Ade Bailey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was recommended to me about ten years ago by one of Gilbert's students. I am having a quick look through it again as a comparison with Rollo May's 'The Meaning of Anxiety' which I am nearly finished reading. May's book was written in the 50s, and updated in 1977 and like the much later Gilbert book I would recommend both as concise introductions to major thinkers in the fields of psychotherapy since Freud. Gilbert brings in too evolutionary psychology, interesting stuff on modular theory and other more recent theorists. A further interest, although I am only dabbling just now, is how the terms 'anxiety' and 'depression' will neither sit conveniently still while both have a continual tendency to hide in each other.

What is fascinating here is that Gilbert's book hardly deals with anxiety at all, although it is so definitely Freudian in much of its orientation and for Freud anxiety is the centre of it all. Gilbert's conceptual mapping is completely different from May's. He seems to take, more or less, 'depression' as an entity. I think May does a splendid job of indicating a core identity for anxiety, and I personally can see the possibility of establishing anxiety as the precursor of depression (and, very possibly, of all the major mental health diagnoses). Paradoxically, much of Gilbert's analysis is congruent with May's. It suggests once again that clearing the linguistic classifications and concepts is needed to bring greater clarity to what one psychiatrist (http://www.bluetoblue.org/ for his blog) called the 'epistemological quagmire' that attends his work

[Heiki Eesmaa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic synthesis, I believe his later work is mostly still in line with this.