This resource features a wealth of interactive exercises that teach essential coping skills.

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The Depression Workbook offers step-by-step, self-help guidance for:

• Taking responsibility for your own wellness
• Using charts to track and control your moods
• Finding appropriate mental health professionals
• Building a support system
• Increasing your self-confidence and self-esteem
• Using relaxation, diet, exercise, and full-sprectrum light to stabilize your moods
• Avoiding conditions that can exacerbate your mood swings

This resource features a wealth of interactive exercises that teach essential coping skills, offers special sections that provide up-to-date information about optimizing the therapeutic effects of exercise, full-spectrum lighting, and diet, as well as the possible harmful effects of electromagnetic radiation.

The workbook is further enlighted by the responses of 120 participants in a survey of depressives and manic depressives, who share their insights, experiences, and strategies for living with extreme mood swings.

Sample Activity

A Four-Step Process for Eliminating Distorted Thoughts

There are several simple and very effective techniques for changing or eliminating stress-producing, distorted, and negative thought patterns to positive ones. By systematically examining thought patterns and applying behavioral techniques, you can change the way you think and feel about yourself and your life. This will have a profound effect on your moods, and will greatly enhance the quality of your life. The four steps in this process involve

Identifying your emotion
Describing the situation that gave rise to the emotion
Identifying the distortion in your thought process
Refuting the distortion

Read through the example below.

1. What emotion (or emotions) are you feeling now?
   I am feeling angry, tense, and anxious.

2. Describe, in detail, the event or situation that gave rise to your emotion.
   I went to my fiend Peter's house at 4:00 p.m., as previously arranged, to go for a walk and have dinner together. He was not at home when I got there.

3. Describe your thoughts, and identify any distortions in your thinking.
   Because Peter wasn't there, I decided he really didn't want to spend the time with me, that he really doesn't like me and doesn't respect my feelings. (This would fit in the category of mind-reading.)

4. Refute the distortions.
   There was only one piece of evidence, his not being there when I arrived, that was the basis for my distortion. The truth is, Peter and I have been close friends for a long time. All evidence indicated that he likes me a lot. An emergency may have come up, he may have gone to do an errand that took longer than anticipated, he may have misunderstood the plan that we made or he may have forgotten that we made a plan (or I may have misunderstood)--any of which are acceptable reasons and do nothing to lend credence to my distorted thought. The best course of action for me would be to wait on his porch (doing relaxation exercises) until his return; or leave him a note asking him to call me when he gets in.

Practice using this four-step process to work on straightening out your distorted thoughts. For your first try, choose a situation in which the distortion in your thinking is fairly easy for you to identify. As the process becomes clearer, you can work on situations in which the distortion is more subtle (or in which there are several distortions operating at once). Use separate sheets of paper to ananlyze each situation.

304 pages; 8 1/2 X 11;soft bound

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