{"id":8456,"date":"2021-01-13T12:25:36","date_gmt":"2021-01-13T12:25:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=8456"},"modified":"2021-12-08T13:57:39","modified_gmt":"2021-12-08T13:57:39","slug":"mending-the-mind-by-oliver-kamm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=8456","title":{"rendered":"Mending the Mind by Oliver Kamm"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The Art and Science of Overcoming Clinical Depression<\/strong><\/p>\n

Published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson 7 January 2021<\/strong><\/p>\n

217pp, Kindle, \u00a316.99<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by N.J. Cooper<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Oliver Kamm, journalist and columnist, had no idea what had happened to him when he suddenly found himself unable to remember his address or how to get home.\u00a0 This was only one manifestation of a serious depressive illness, which caused him extreme anguish and which took a long time to lift.\u00a0 Since his recovery he has explored the whole subject of depression, both through the writers and artists who have suffered from it for millennia and through the philosophers and scientists who have tried to understand it.\u00a0 He has also undertaken research into the various treatments that have been used, sometimes to dreadful effect as in frontal lobotomy, in order to offer his own experience of what actually works.\u00a0 I am glad that he points out that ECT still has great use in otherwise intractable depression and has been unfairly demonized through such means as the film of One Flew Over the Cuckoo\u2019s Nest<\/em>.<\/p>\n

For anyone acquainted with this cruel disorder, the book offers no new fact.\u00a0 We know that it is an illness and that it is never the sufferer\u2019s fault.\u00a0 (I learned to repeat both these truths to my mother, along with urging her to take her antidepressants, when I was about ten, more than half a century ago.)\u00a0 But there are still, as Kamm repeats, plenty of educated \u2013 sometimes medically educated \u2013 people who believe that depression is over-diagnosed and chiefly related to lack of resilience, that doctors hand out antidepressants like sweeties, and that patients should just get a grip.<\/p>\n

His sharing of the work of writers who have given him comfort with their accounts of symptoms that matched his own provides many pleasures, both of recognition and enlightenment.\u00a0 But it is in his eloquently clear accounts of his own suffering and recovery that the book becomes most valuable.\u00a0 As he found, it is almost impossible to read when in the grip of severe depression and so I imagine that Mending the Mind<\/em> will be of most practical use to the friends and relations of sufferers.<\/p>\n

He writes of the anger and betrayal felt by many such friends and relations, but he does not address two of the symptoms that are hardest for carers to deal with and understand.\u00a0 One is the verbal aggression some sufferers display as they are descending into depression and again as they come out of the trench back towards normal life.\u00a0 The other is that all too many people with depression reject the pills that have been prescribed.\u00a0 Sometimes they simply refuse to take them; at others, they lie and pretend they are taking the full dose.\u00a0 Excuses \u2013 or reasons \u2013 for this include: \u2018I don\u2019t feel like me when I\u2019m taking them\u2019; \u2018They take away my creativity\u2019; and \u2018They make me feel like a zombie\u2019, to which the only response should be, \u2018Isn\u2019t it better to feel like a zombie than to suffer the anguish Oliver Kamm describes so movingly?\u2019 \u00a0It becomes hard not to think that something about this terrible condition must provide some illusion of safety, as though the responsibility of recovery is simply too frightening.<\/p>\n

Kamm found, after a disastrous false start with psychodynamic therapy, that a combination of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and Compassion-Focused Therapy, with an increased dose of antidepressants, eventually allowed him to think in different ways, to stop catastrophizing, and to train himself to carry out previously impossible practical tasks, such as opening his own front door.<\/p>\n

In a way the process struck me as akin to physiotherapy:\u00a0 if you regularly and accurately perform the exercises your physio has prescribed, you will find your knee pain recedes and you can walk upright again in a way that prevents you doing yet more damage to the joint. Clearly CBT and CFT must be provided as readily as physiotherapy.With some missteps, Kamm gradually became aware again of the possibility of pleasure; he learned how to read for hours at a time once more; he found renewed joy in music.\u00a0 And he wrote this book.<\/p>\n

I hope that those who doubt the existence of severe depression will be convinced by what he has told us, and I shall go back to many of the writers and thinkers whose work he has quoted because he left me wanting much, much more from them, but I still hope that someone out there, who understands the malady as well as Oliver Kamm does, will write a direct recipe book that can be of immediate use to those who are suffering now \u2013 and for those others who are doing their often thankless best to care for them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by N. J. Cooper<\/p>\n

His sharing of the work of writers who have given him comfort with their accounts of symptoms that matched his own provides many pleasures, both of recognition and enlightenment. But it is in his eloquently clear accounts of his own suffering and recovery that the book becomes most valuable. As he found, it is almost impossible to read when in the grip of severe depression and so I imagine that Mending the Mind<\/em> will be of most practical use to the friends and relations of sufferers […] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8456"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8456\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8460,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8456\/revisions\/8460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}