Does anyone know of any genuinely insightful and helpful literature on depression and anxiety?

Does anyone know of any genuinely insightful and helpful literature on depression and anxiety?

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crime and punishment

My novel.

I'm not letting you read it though

ah, another weak man, eh? another effeminate man with mental problems, eh? another fag boy, eh? little faggot weak boy! HAHA! the social degeneracy is all around me....

I have pretty severe anxiety (rushing and intrusive thoughts, suicidal ideation, attacks) and when I went to a therapist he told me to stop reading.

I ended up just doing no drugs and no therapy and buried myself in a mix of christianity and epicureanism. And I kept reading

Get into cognitive behavourial therapy and mindfulness.

I get trashing /pol/ dinks who've flocked here and talk memekid polemic trash but this is only you shitting on some guy going through bad times. He didn't even say anything to warrant it.

ah, monsieur, what a touching defence of OP's psychological well being, among all these ideological skirmishes, a human moment, a kodak moment !!!!!!! BRAVO monsieur

>ah, monsieur
why the fuck do I keep seeing this everywhere?

The Myth of Mental Illness by Thomas S. Szasz
The Culture of Narcissism by Christopher Lasch

The first is not as incendiary as the title makes it sound, its pretty standard reading for psychology students and really aids in understanding the limitations to the language we use in discussing, understanding and diagnosing mental illness. It is limited in some areas, and shows its age a little, but overall I found it a very useful book.

The second is not explicitly about mental illness, but addresses a lot of the experiences common to the depressed and anxious.Scarily relatable.

Neither of these books will necessarily tell you what you want to hear, but they will tell you what you maybe need to hear. They won't cure your depression or anxiety either, but will go some way in helping you understand why you feel the way you do, and how you can go about re-positioning yourself so as to feel differently in the future.

This is pretty much what you want op. Also read up on cog bio, its under your control.

Lasch, monsieur? bravo

>The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt

Looks like feel-good trash at a glance (and it does contain elements of that) but is actually surprisingly insightful. Pretty much a review of various traditions and modern discoveries on happiness and its opposite.

>The Trouble With Being Born by Emil Cioran

A book that will either increase or decrease your depression depending how you consider its contents. Pretty funny writing, at least in the original.

>Whatever by Houellebecq

Examines modern day despair

>Nausea by Sartre

Similar to the above while extremely different. Make of it what you will.

>Overcoming Depression by Paul Gilbert

Gives a good overview of depression. Parts of it may be outdated

>Full Catastrophe Living by Jon Kabat-Zinn

Good introductory work on mindfulness

>Infinite Jest by DFW

Kind of a meme obviously but worth it solely for the descriptions of depression

>A Guide to the Good Life by William Irvine

Stoicism is a meme as well but this book is short and worth the detour

>Courage Under Fire by James Stockdale

A short PDF that gives you practical insight on the possibilities of Stoicism by someone who really used it to its fullest potential

>Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence by David Benatar

Having a good day? Opening this book can fix that!

>The Conspiracy against the Human Race

Same as above, but much worse. Do not read this if you are actually in dire straits.

Schopenhauer might be something for you. He is said to be incredibly pessimistic, but I find his writings on life to be soothing in a strange way.

The "Aphorisms on the wisdom of life" in "Parerga and Paralipomena" is where he deals most explicitly with such topics, I think.

What I like about him is that he advocated against suicide as he felt it would just be a meaningless and insignificant act like any other

most likely not on our type of anxiety user ;__;
nice name man :)

Yes.
The Mindful Way Through Depression. Here's the book + audiobook + guided meditations. (PDF+MP3): mediafire.com/file/stl5ctg1ptogszt/MWTD.zip

I don't know about helpful (don't think any book can cure you), but this is a very well researched and informative book on depression, touching on personal experiences, treatments, science, history, philosophy, sociology etc. It does have a bit of a pro-pharmaceutical bias to it (The author can only survive the day through a shit ton of meds), but it's still critical of a lot of contemporary psychiatry.

Also it's got a shitton of laudatory blurbs from Harold Bloom, W.G. Sebold, Louise Erdrich, James Watson and more.

because this Haitian creole is all the over place like a bad rash.
>Thanks, Hillary.

Panofsky's Saturn and melancholy is also an enlightening read.

The Concept of Anxiety by Kierkegaard. It's pretty abstract and signifies more to the anxious of the Christian deterministic sort than it does to those of the modern hikki variety, but I still found it highly engaging.

There's also The Mindful Way Through Anxiety too. I would recommend reading more science based stuff like cognitive behavioral therapy books rather than a random novel. But it does make me feel better to read philosophy or literature on the subject of anx/dep. i don't know why. Also if you're in college, you could probably get CBT for free or cheap. You're not weak for having depression or anxiety user, but you do have the ability to help yourself. If you take CBT seriously, and makes an honest and consistent effort into getting better then you will. But it really takes effort.

Really?

Where can one read this?

Check into The Relaxation Response. An excellent text.

>If you take CBT seriously, and makes an honest and consistent effort into getting better then you will
How do I go about starting this process? I've talked to a few therapists before but they really didn't offer anything insightful, just asked questions and had me talk through my issues (which didn't really help for the record).

There's a scan on Libgen. Be warned, it's massive though. (last time I checked...)

shotgun 2 head do it now and stream it

therapy, ideally, is about helping you to understand the rules of the games you play and then developing strategies as to how best play those games
when depression/anxiety arise it is often because the sufferer either does not know the rules of the game they are playing or do not realise they are playing a game at all

posts like these allow me to laugh at myself

therapy is about establishing genuine interpersonal growth you sociopath. life isn't meant to be viewed as a "game". tell that to a therapist and see if they agree with you or if they politely talk around it.

>genuine interpersonal growth

each and everyone of our interpersonal relationships rely on the following of rules in order to operate. establishing a genuine interpersonal connection is learning how to express your emotions within the boundaries defined by those rules.

So to me, a big part of anxiety and depression is automatic negative thoughts. Your experiences are filtered by these thoughts so that everyday things become terrible. CBT is about recognizing these biases and learning to see them for what they are which is just a filter to reality not reality itself. Also the fact that you left the therapists tells me you weren't taking it seriously. Therapists aren't philosophers so they won't really blow you away with some profound statement. That's not the point. Tackleing your own thoughts is difficult to do all by yourself so it's helpful to have some one with a lot of training to help guide you. Even thinking that the therapy is a waste of time could have been a depressive thought. You really need to resist these and continue to strive to help yourself even when you have no hope at the moment.

Good post. A lot of people just romanticize psychologists and group them all under Freudian, getting to the bottom of why we do whatever we do and how we wanna fuck our moms. This isn't the case with CBT, it's not didactic, it focuses on the ability to reconstruct the patients thoughts, and live in the present. I'm really thankful for my cbt therapy, I've grown a lot as a person. I need to start practicing mindfulness though.

>depression
Cardio three times a week for at least 30 minutes
>anxiety
Being and Time

The horrible truth is that nothing can cure your depression but yourself.
You are at your emotional worst and you have to fix everything alone because nobody else can trully interact with your mind.

Its the cruelest joke.

I've run 3km a day, besides Friday's for the past two weeks, when does my depression go away?

>If you take CBT seriously

hard to take a therapy with the same acronym as cock ball torture seriously, but what's it about

that guy from linkin park killing himself made me depressed for someone reason, probably because i always thought his music was just manufactured pop shit designed to separate angsty teens from their allowance money but now it turns out all that morrissey tier whiney shit was actually what he believed, i'm like fuck, plus some chick i fucked in college was really into them and she was depressed af so it took me back to undegrad which is always depressing

When you outrun it.

i have hella anxiety all week and it just gets worse i don't know what the fuck is up maybe it's the heat idk

You should put that in the thread for aphorisms and teen-deep-ness.

You focus on your unhelpful thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, feeling, emotions, and behaviors and how to change them for the better. Please google it yourself tho.

My diary.