Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy Revised and Updated,   ISBN:9780380810338

Customer Rating: 

The title of my review is actually a summary of how this book plans to make you feel better.

The book is authored by a someone who has had a lot of experience using cognitive therapy techniques to try and improve people's depression. Cognitive therapy's premise is that your thinking (messages that you are giving yourself all day long) directly inflences your moods and how you feel. Therefore, if you are thinking negatively, you're going to feel that way. Likewise, if you think positive and optimistically, well, you're going to feel good!

And that's what the book is about- getting you to get rid of negative thoughts and replacing them with good ones. Does it work? Well, the book has been around since 1980, and there's actually been some good solid research that has actually taken the book, given it to depressed patients.....and they've improved!

With its easy writing style and research-backed techniques, Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy +Revised and Updated is definitely worth the read- just know you've got over 500+ pages ahead of you. If this seems too daunting, or this approach doesn't appeal to you, try something like Exercise Beats Depression- which has been shown to be just as effective as cognitive therapy or drugs in controlled trials. Good luck!

Customer Rating: 

Very wordy, simplistic view of depression.
If you weren't depressed before reading this book, you will be after!

Customer Rating: 

The first few chapters of this book is what really helped me discover that my own negative and pessimistic thoughts and perspectives is what was keeping me feeling depressed. This book can also help you feel better by discovering your own negative thinking patterns. Dr. Burns shows you how to feel better and how to accomplish this through easy exercises, and through doctor patient dialogue.
I feel this book is a must read for anyone who is deppressed and wants to feel better.

Customer Rating: 

An increasingly conspicuous symptom of depression is chronic fatigue. It is especially troublesome because, whether or not it pre-dates or post-dates the onset of depression, it severly aggravates that condition.

Chronic fatigue associated with depression may or may not be accompanied by insomnia or other forms of sleep disorder. In any case, the effects of chronic fatigue as related to depression can be devestating.

In spite of the fact that chronic fatigue is a symptom reported by more and more depressed people, the author of Feeling Good simply blows it off in one sentence. A very fair paraphrase of his response to chronic fatigue is "get over it."

It is not difficult to see why the author might very well adopt this stance. After all, how does one change cognitive behavior to address chronic fatigue? The same applies to insomnia.

I once went to a cognitive behavior therapist who told me, "You can't always sleep eight hours, but you can always rest eight hours." I didn't know whether to laugh or punch him. When I exercised retraint and merely laughed, he became furious -- derisive, contemptuous, dismissive -- all the wrong responses to someone who felt as if he were on the edge and ready to fall off. Cognitive therapists, it may be, are inordinately hostile to those who are not easily sold on their product. But of course this is just an anecdote.

One of the tenets of coginitive therapy, repeated again and again by the author of Feeling Good, is that just because you feel something does not make it real. This assertion, in effect, is an admonition to dismiss as unreal and therefore inconsequential all subconcsious processes.

One need not be an orthodox Freudian to to be suspicious of this claim. After all, feeling bad has to have a provenance. I don't know of any one who simply decides, "Oh, what the Hell, I'm going to feel lousy about myself." Anyone who is a student of developmental psyhology, and who takes the psyche seriously as an extraordinarily complex, poorly understood set of neurological structures, would have very serious reservations about the Feeling Good diagnosis, process, and outcome.

Recent, widely reported research, has found that trying to think in a way that is sharply at odds with how you feel can be quite harmful. It is, in effect, a systematic form of denial that makes things worse rather than better.

All tolled, I've concluded that Feeling Good is a lucrative exercise in psychotherapeutic charlatanism. Yes, good mental health care is increasingly hard to find, so in desperation we turn to psychological potboilers such as this. All to the benefit of the author. A truly sad set of circumstances.

Customer Rating: 

I've recommended this book to multiple friends and family members as something that helped me greatly where counseling and analyzing were ineffective. I wish I had read this book as a teenager before many years of struggling with depression and anxiety. While counseling sessions left me to find my own answers time and again, this book introduced practical concrete steps to take in order to teach myself how to change my thinking. If you've felt frustrated with the ambiguity of what it means to "get better," and how to take steps toward that, please read this book and practice the exercises it explains. It is full of insights, easy to read and accessible to people of all different levels. It addresses the thought patterns and specific thoughts that underlie self-hatred, fear, shyness, anger management problems, and many other issues. Though the writing may initially seem like the language of an infomercial, or pop-psychology work that will be all pulp, don't let it throw you off of the great information within it.