Skip to main content

A Friend for the Depressed


Book

Title: Why do I feel so sad?

Author: Dr Shefali Batra

Publisher: Jaico, 2023

Pages: 305

Having gone through extreme depression two times, I know how painful the state is. You feel you are the most damned fool on the earth, utterly useless. You curse the day you were born. You long for death. Worst of all, you don’t trust anyone, not even those who intend to help you sincerely. I trusted books, however. Weren’t they my friends forever, the only friends who didn’t ditch me at any time?

Dr Shefali Batra’s book, Why do I feel so sad? Your pathway to healing depression, is an eminently companionable text that I will recommend to anyone who is going through depression. The book is divided into five parts. You will get to know the theoretical and scientific aspects of depression in the first part. The title of the second part is self-explanatory: ‘Thoughts rule you, but when twisted, they could fool you.’ The subsequent parts take you on a self-re-creating journey.

Dr Batra’s approach is firmly founded on Cognitive Psychology which looks at our beliefs, attitudes, intentions and other mental processes which determine our behaviour. “We all respond to events or situations in accordance with what we think and feel about it,” as the book puts it. Miracle is a change of attitude, as I used to repeat ad infinitum in my classes. I got that concept from Cognitive Psychology. By the way, I did a postgraduate course in psychology from Indira Gandhi National Open University. Cognitive psychology caught my attention the most.

Dr Batra’s book can be an ideal companion for anyone going through depression. She is a practising psychiatrist with much experience. Each chapter of her book presents the theoretical framework illustrating it with examples from her experience before going on to suggest certain exercises. This is not a book that is to be read; this is to be practised. Put the exercises into practice if you have depressive moods or tendencies.

We live in a difficult world in which approximately 703,000 people opt for death every year. That is, one person commits suicide every 45 seconds. Dr Batra informs us that the number of people who attempt suicide is 20 times this number. What may shock us further is the fact that “suicide ranks as one of the top four causes of death among 15- to 29-year-olds worldwide.”

All these people actually do not want to die. They want to put an end to their suffering. They wish to put an end to their feelings of defeat, entrapment, burden, isolation, disconnection… When the number of people choosing death is so large, the problem is indeed very acute and deserves close attention. Books like this one are immensely handy.

“Sometimes it’s the smallest decisions that can change your life forever,” as Keri Russell said. I got that and a lot more inspiring quotes from Dr Batra’s book. This book can help anyone to make certain decisions, even if they are not suffering from depression. 



Labels:

Comments

  1. Yamini MacLeanMarch 10, 2024 at 2:43 PM

    Hari Om
    As one who's medical practice was fifty percent counselling, I commend and support this book choice! YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
  2. Liz A.March 11, 2024 at 2:33 AM

    It is indeed a terrible problem. I'm glad the book was worthwhile.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
37 comments
Read more

Mango Trees and Cats

Appu and Dessie, two of our cats, love to sleep under the two mango trees in front of our house these days. During the daytime, that is, when the temperature threatens to brush 40 degrees Celsius. The shade beneath the mango trees remains a cool 28 degrees or so. Mango trees have this tremendous cooling effect. When I constructed the house, the area in front had no touch of greenery as you can see in the pic below.  Now the same area, which was totally arid then, looks like what's below:  Appu and Dessie find their bower in that coolness.  I wanted to have a lot of colours around my house. I tried growing all sorts of flower plants and failed rather miserably. The climate changes are beyond the plants’ tolerance levels. Moreover, all sorts of insects and pests come from nowhere and damage the plants. Crotons survive and even thrive. I haven’t given up hope with the others yet. There are a few adeniums, rhoeos, ixoras, zinnias and so on growing in the pots. They are trying their
7 comments
Read more

Brownie and I - a love affair

The last snap I took of Brownie That Brownie went away without giving me a hint is what makes her absence so painful. It’s nearly a month and I know now for certain that she won’t return. Worse, I know that she didn’t want to leave me. She couldn’t have. Brownie is the only creature who could make me do what she wanted. She had the liberty to walk into my bedroom at any time of the night and wake me up for a bite of her favourite food. She would sit below the bed and meow. If I didn’t get up and follow her, she would climb on the bed and meow to my face. She knew I would get up and follow her to the cupboard where bags of cat food were stored.  My Mistress in my study Brownie was not my only cat; there were three others. But none of the other three ever made the kind of demands that Brownie made. If any of them came to eat the food I served Brownie at odd hours of the night, Brownie would flatly refuse to eat with them in spite of the fact that it was she who had brought me out of
4 comments
Read more

Everything is Politics

Politics begins to contaminate everything like an epidemic when ideology dies. Death of ideology is the most glaring fault line on the rock of present Indian democracy. Before the present regime took charge of the country, political parties were driven by certain underlying ideologies though corruption was on the rise from Indira Gandhi’s time onwards. Mahatma Gandhi’s ideology was rooted in nonviolence. Nothing could shake the Mahatma’s faith in that ideal. Nehru was a staunch secularist who longed to make India a nation of rational people who will reap the abundant benefits proffered by science and technology. Even the violent left parties had the ideal of socialism to guide them. The most heartless political theory of globalisation was driven by the ideology of wealth-creation for all. When there is no ideology whatever, politics of the foulest kind begins to corrode the very soul of the nation. And that is precisely what is happening to present India. Everything is politics
14 comments
Read more

A Rat’s Death

I’m reading an anthology of Urdu stories written by different authors and translated into English by Rakshanda Jalil. These are stories taken from the rural backyards of India. I wish to focus on just one of them here today merely because I love it for its aesthetic intensity. A Rat’s Death by Zakia Mashhadi is the story of an impecunious man named Dhena who is a Musahar. Musahar is a Dalit community whose very name means ‘rat eater.’ Their main occupation is catching rats which they eat too because of inescapable destitution. One day Dhena is tempted by the offer made by Mishrji, a political broker. Go to the city and take part in a political rally and “You will get eight rupees, and also sherbet and puris with sabzi.” Puris and sabzi with sherbet to boot is a banquet for Dhena for whom even salt in his rat meat is a luxury. Dhena is scared of the city’s largeness and rush and pomp. But the reward is too tempting. The city people who eat puri-sabzi consider people like Dhena
10 comments
Read more