Gordon Parker, an experienced Australian researcher and clinician, adds this lecture to the trade books that are published to help patients and their families understand what it means to be depressed and what the mental health professional can do to help. The local speech idioms make it user-friendly for Australian readers.

Psychotic, melancholic, and nonmelancholic forms of depression are described. These read like the descriptions of cough classified as wet or dry and productive or nonproductive before Pasteur’s insights set clinicians on the road of bacteriology to antibiotics. Parker describes the commonly accepted neurohumoral model of mood disorders and recommends a smorgasbord of medications and psychotherapies, with a soupçon of physical therapies. Dr. Parker’s patient vignettes are useful for the reader who can see a family member in them. He also offers short lists of mainly Australian Internet sites and reference books.

Such books are useful aids in educating patients and patients’ families about depressive illness and assuring informed consent and greater compliance with treatment. Other trade books that plow the same field are Papolos and Papolos’s Overcoming Depression(1), DePaulo and Horvitz’s Understanding Depression(2), Koplewicz’s More Than Moody(3), and Torrey and Knable’s Surviving Manic-Depression(4).

In addition to the professional views of mood disorders, patient reports are particularly useful in assuring patients that their experience is not unique and can be remedied. Such writers as Kay Jamison (5), Kathy Cronkite (6), Norman Endler (7), Martha Manning (8), William Styron (9), and Sherwin Nuland (10) give us poignant self-reports of the depressive experience and how it was relieved. Such books should be available for patients in psychiatrists’ offices and psychiatric clinics.