Reading as a Cure for Depression?

Reading your way out of depression

What I find most intriguing is the teaser beneath the head: "I suspect you need a very individual prescription. . . "  And that would make a certain amount of sense because every depression requires an individual treatment, with or without the present pharmacopia.  But Saul Bellow as a way out of depression?  Not in my reading--Seize the Day is a one-book formula for hyperanxiety.  But, I'm not widely versed in Bellow, so I guess I'm going to have to visit Herzog sometime soon.

Comments

  1. AnonymousJanuary 19, 2010 at 8:16 AM

    A very individual prescription indeed. "Henderson The Rain King" has been the limits of Bellows that I've read and I found it more exasperating than uplifting.

    I'd say the author of the article had some lucky synchronicity going on. John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series got me thru my parents' divorce, but that was thru distraction.

    I'm not surprised to hear that good literature can help, but I'd be cautions about substituting a reading list for treatment. I would like to believe that a reading life can help the mind stay balanced, active, and immune from depression, but I fear that is not the case.

    For me, Herodotus helps me to regain perspective and centeredness, but that's only been for a funk, not outright depression.

    ReplyDelete
  2. StevenJanuary 19, 2010 at 8:33 AM

    Dear Randy,

    And the author makes your critical point early on in the essay. As you note, you may read yourself out of a funk, and reading may help during clinical depression (if you find yourself capable of doing anything at all), but "the reading cure" is likely to be as ultimately effective as the "rest cure" was for Virginia Woolf and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. (Just take a glance at "The Yellow Wallpaper."

    Thanks for this caution--an important one.

    shalom,

    Steven

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Angel Time--Anne Rice

Review copy received 11/04/09 From the time of its announcement, I had been looking forward to this new book by Anne Rice.  As I say in every review, I am not a die-hard Anne Rice fan.  I found Interview with a Vampire interesting and intriguing, but in hindsight, must lay much of the responsibility of the current vampire as victim and love-object obsession at its feet.  After that, I had no patience with her writing until Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. In that book I observed a kind of control and authorial voice that I had not seen in any of the books I had sampled since Interview .  So too with Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana. Perhaps because of the subject matter, perhaps for other reasons, these two books seemed to witness a level of control of language and story that the other books did not.  Gone were messy florid passages that lavished two, three, four paragraphs on the description of the lace and flounce of a jabot.  These new books were spare, polished, poetic. The
Read more

Another Queen of Night

I post this because whenever I recommend to anyone the Queen of Night, I always recommend it in the Lucia Popp rendition.  It's a matter of personal taste, but what I love about this is that it is somewhat slower than the other versions and as a result, it would seem to me somewhat more difficult to perform and sustain--those high notes in which the Queen's voice becomes the Magic Flute itself are rounded, full, and deep while remaining light and airy. I have read some rather severe criticism of this ritardando; and while it may or may not reflect Mozart's intent, it is certainly within the options for staging.  It creates a real vocal showpiece from what is already a magnificent example of same. It really is an amazing example of a virtuoso composition sung by a virtuoso voice.  All of which should not be taken to mean that I do not truly appreciate the version posted earlier by Diana Damrau, it's just nice to see what a difference tempo can make. I think we can take
Read more