The intention of the author is commendable, yet I couldn't get through the book. No stranger to the world of mental health, I thought this would be right up my alley. Yet I felt troubled by the disconnect between the author's efforts to demystify depression and construct empathy for its sufferers while maintaining a narrow vision of the affliction that boxed it firmly within the boundaries of science and medicine.

Framed as such, it is inevitable that the discussion will be limited to those spheres and the solutions found there as well (of course with some help from "public policy"). Such a mechanistic, prescribed approach to the psyche is inadequate and doomed to fail. In reading, I found myself consistently irritated by what wasn't said or allowed into the conversation - primarily the immaterial, messy and unquantifiable. Matters of the soul, the spiritual, the communal. Of belonging, alienation, meaning, being. Of the depths of the human experience and what events such as depression can signify and offer back to us as a means for us to become more fully ourselves.

There is certainly space and importance for psychology, medication, and biology in this matter, but to leave it at that is to frustrate a full exploration of a critically important phenomenon - just as this book frustrated me.