Many of us embark on the spiritual search seeking relief from depression and anxiety. In this revealing and deeply meaningful book, Mitch makes a frank and responsible survey of how the spiritual path can aid or impede you in this journey. As Mitch reveals from his many years as a writer, publisher, and seeker, the spiritual culture does not always respond wisely to the needs of people seeking emotional health. Nor can spiritual progress and emotional health necessarily be equated. Mitch lays out a new paradigm for how you can combine traditional, alternative, and self-designed approaches to find the right path forward in your search for the higher and need for emotional wellbeing.

Experiences of Depression is a philosophical exploration of what it is like to be depressed. In this important new book, Matthew Ratcliffe develops a detailed account of depression experiences by drawing on work in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and several other disciplines. In so doing, he makes clear how phenomenological research can contribute to psychiatry, by helping us to better understand patients' experiences, as well as informing classification, diagnosis, and treatment. Throughout the book, Ratcliffe also emphasizes the relevance of depression to philosophical enquiry. He proposes that, by reflecting on how experiences of depression differ from 'healthy' forms of experience, we can refine our understanding of both. Hence phenomenological research of this kind has much wider applicability. He further shows how the study of depression experiences can inform philosophical approaches to a range of topics, including interpersonal understanding and empathy, free will, the experience of time, the nature of emotion and feeling, what it is to believe something, and what it is to hope. This book will be of interest to anyone seeking to understand and relate to experiences of depression, including philosophers, psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, therapists, and those who have been directly or indirectly affected by depression.

Countless Christians — including scores of saints — have suffered profound, pervasive sorrow that modern psychiatrists call “depression.” Then, as now, great faith and even fervent spiritual practices have generally failed to ease this wearying desolation of soul. In these pages, Catholic psychiatrist Aaron Kheriaty reviews the effective ways that have recently been devised to deal with this grave and sometimes deadly affliction — ways that are not only consistent with the teachings of the Church, but even rooted in many of those teachings. Extensive clinical experience treating patients with depression has shown Dr. Kheriaty that the confessional can't cure neuroses, nor can the couch forgive sin. Healing comes only when we integrate the legitimate discoveries of modern psychology and pharmacology with spiritual direction and the Sacraments, giving particular attention to the wisdom of the Church Fathers and the saints. Here, with the expert help of Dr. Kheriaty, you'll learn how to distinguish depression from similarlooking but fundamentally different mental states such as guilt, sloth, the darkness of sin, and the sublime desolation called “dark night of the soul” that is, in fact, a privileged spiritual trial sent to good souls as a special gift from God. You'll come to know how to identify the various types of depression and come to understand the interplay of their often manifold causes, biological, psychological, behavioral, cultural, and, yes, moral. Then you'll learn about exciting breakthroughs in pharmacological and other medical treatments, the benefits and limitations of psychotherapy, the critical place that spiritual direction must have in your healing, and the vital role that hope — Christian hope — can play in driving out depression.

Philosophy has much to offer psychiatry, not least regarding ethical issues, but also issues regarding the mind, identity, values, and volition. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry offers the most comprehensive reference resource for this area every published - one that is essential for both students and researchers in this field.

In Mental Reality, Galen Strawson argues that much contemporary philosophy of mind gives undue primacy of place to publicly observable phenomena, nonmental phenomena, and behavioral phenomena (understood as publicly observable phenomena) in its account of the nature of mind. It does so at the expense of the phenomena of conscious experience. Strawson describes an alternative position, "naturalized Cartesianism," which couples the materialist view that mind is entirely natural and wholly physical with a fully realist account of the nature of conscious experience. Naturalized Cartesianism is an adductive (as opposed to reductive) form of materialism. Adductive materialists don't claim that conscious experience is anything less than we ordinarily conceive it to be, in being wholly physical. They claim instead that the physical is something more than we ordinarily conceive it to be, given that many of the wholly physical goings-on in the brain constitute -- literally are -- conscious experiences as we ordinarily conceive them.

Hope has long been a topic of interest for psychologists, philosophers, educators, and physicians. In the past few decades, researchers from various disciplines and from around the world have studied how hope relates to superior academic performance, improved outcomes in the workplace, and improved psychological and physical health in individuals of all ages. Edited by Matthew W. Gallagher and the late Shane J. Lopez, The Oxford Handbook of Hope provides readers with a thorough and comprehensive update on the past 25 years of hope research while simultaneously providing an outline of what leading hope researchers believe the future of this line of research to be. In this extraordinary volume, Gallagher, Lopez, and their expert team of contributors discuss such topics as how best to define hope, how hope is distinguished from related philosophical and psychological constructs, what the current best practices are for measuring and quantifying hope, interventions and strategies for promoting hope across a variety of settings, the impact it has on physical and mental health, and the ways in which hope promotes positive functioning. Throughout its pages, these experts review what is currently known about hope and identify the topics and questions that will help guide the next decade of research ahead.