Nell Casey, Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression (New York: Perennial Harper Collins, 2002. Pp. ix, 299.)

If you are seeking a “Chicken Soup for the Depressed Soul” brimming with uplifting stories, this book is not the source.

Unholy Ghost reflects the ordeal of depression via the perspectives of those coping with it. The DSM-IV provides a skeletal structure for understanding the diagnosis. These essays add flesh to the framework. The reader is given an opportunity to intimately connect with each writer’s experience of anguish. Some might criticize these essays as self-absorbed and declare the writers to be imperfect. Well, that’s the point. This book is about personal involvement, revealing humans who try to genuinely articulate their journeys. Among many viewpoints, the reader will grapple with the issue of taking medication while pregnant, what it is like to be an African American woman who is depressed, how one person’s “failed” suicide led to a reckoning with life, trying to understand the heritability of depression, and the general strange reality of living with this heavy companion.

This book does not contain answers. It is ponderous and sometimes disconsolate reading. What it does is invite the reader to walk alongside each writer and learn vicariously what depression can be. As a person who lives with major depression and dysthymia, I was fascinated by these voices and heartened by their company. As a psychotherapist, these essays will be a valuable tool for me in educating people about the dimensions of depression.