Speaking of Sadness

Combining a scholar's care and thoroughness with searing personal insight, David A. Karp brings the private experience of depression into sharp relief, drawing on a remarkable series of intimate interviews with fifty depressed men and women. By turns poignant, disturbing, mordantly funny, and wise, Karp's interviews cause us to marvel at the courage of depressed people in dealing with extraordinary and debilitating pain. We hear what depression feels like, what itmeans to receive an "official" clinical diagnosis, and what depressed persons think of the battalion of mental health experts—doctors, nurses, social workers, sociologists, psychologists, and therapists—employed to help them. Ranging in age from their early twenties to their mid-sixties, the peopleKarp profiles reflect on their working lives, career aspirations, and intimate relationships, and confide strategies for overcoming paralyzing episodes of hopelessness. Throughout, Karp probes the myriad ways society contributes to widespread alienation and emotional exhaustion.In a new and extensive introduction since the original publication of Speaking of Sadness twenty years ago, Karp evaluates the state of and social movements for the depression experience. He traces his personal depression journey along with the reception of his readers since the book's original publication. In addition, he offers a clear perspective on the consequences of wholesale medicalization permeating cultural treatment of depression, and calls towards a movement to listen to andto voice the experiences of the marginalized.Speaking of Sadness remains distinctive in its dedication to recounting stories and discovering clear patterns in them. Karp pierces through the terrifying isolation of depression to uncover the connections linking the depressed as they undertake their personal journeys through this very private hell. This book will bring new understanding to professionals seeking to see the world as their clients do, and provide vivid insights and renewed empathy to anyone who cares for someone living with thecruel unpredictability of depression.

This sociological consideration of illness and disease in contemporary America comes from a professor (Boston Coll.) who uses his own suffering, treatment, and theory along with reports of 50 others who volunteered to talk with him about their major depressive episodes. Karp writes well, addressing psychological, chemical, and cultural perspectives, with much credit to C. Wright Mills, Erving Goffman, and Arthur Kleinman. Many psychiatrists would agree that too little attention is paid to the nature of the pain and the impact of social context on our definitions of normality and treatment. "Self-help" comes under fire, too, as shallow ideology in a time of advancing anomie. A careful, honest writer, Karp has produced a classic equal to William Styron's Darkness Visible (LJ 8/90) and Clifford Beers's A Mind That Found Itself (1908). Highly recommended for sufferers, would-be healers, and anyone interested in the effects of depression. E. James Lieberman, Library Journal, The millions of people who suffer hard and long with excruciating depressions will recognize themselves in these pages....Speaking of Sadness provides an open challenge to wrestle with the difficult questions., A careful, honest writer, Karp has produced a classic equal to William Styron's Darkness Visible., Finally a book from the inside...by a scholar who admits to knowing this aspect of the human condition in his own person and has seen beyond the superstition of the 'medical model,' expressed in the lived experience of real and beautifully articulate people who, like himself, have been there.

David A. Karp, PhD, is a Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Boston College where he taught for 42 years. He has written or co-authored ten books and more than fifty journal articles and book chapters. His work appears in such periodicals as Symbolic Interaction, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Journal of Qualitative Health Research, the Gerontologist, and the International Journal of Aging and Human Development. His work has largely clustered in three areas:urban life and culture, aging, and the study of mental health and illness.