2 out of 4 stars
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From Darkness into Marvelous Light by Tamera C Trotter is a book about depression from the point of view of a person who has suffered from this condition and learned how to live with it. Advice is given for current sufferers and for the friends and family members of suffers. This book is generally clearly and persuasively written and well structured.
The greatest strength, and weakness, of this book is that it is written largely from personal experience. Many things about depression, and what allows a person to cope with it and continue to live well, are fairly universal to most people who suffer from this debilitating condition. And personal experience gives a person unique authority.
That said, depression is a broad spectrum of experience that differs in terms of the symptoms themselves and how a person’s nature, culture and situation in life cause them to react. Pathways to coping and recovery are even more diverse. This book is not a memoir, it is a book of general advice to sufferers and family—as such it is subject to critique in terms of how well the content suits all potential readers rather than just expressing what happened to the author and how they personally chose to respond.
For much of the first half of the book I found myself in good agreement with the author but there were also ways in which her experience and mine had nothing in common and her generalizations of the depression experience did not apply to me in many cases. As such, I feel that the blurb and cover of this book should more explicitly indicate that that is a book for people of a certain kind of Christian faith. I know faith can be a precious path to healing for many people but it is far from a universal answer, specifically when one is speaking about a particular subset of a particular religious faith.
As a person who faced severe depression and found a way through to recover and thrive I am now, as I have always been, an atheist. Therefore a book of this type has limited usefulness to a person like me. I also had the great good fortune to not have recurrence episodes of depression for an extended period, quite possibly permanently, a possibility not acknowledged in this book.
I feel this book would be very useful to a certain reader, and should be more specifically packaged and marketed for this audience. I rate this book 2 out of 4 stars.
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From Darkness Into The Marvelous Light
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-- 14 Jan 2016, 16:57 --
Technically I think this review should really be in the "non-fiction" reviews section? It is non-fction psychology/self help.
