By Oxford psychotherapist Wyn Bramley.

THERE’S a lot of stuff written about depression which is very archaic.

This new book is for the public: I’ve tried to put it all together in an accessible way, covering varying perspectives.

I’m 78 now and started doing this when I was 17.

I’ve been a general psychotherapist for many years, and my publisher said there was very little out there about depression which wasn’t accessible for the average person, and there was a bit of a gap in the market.

If you or your loved ones are feeling depressed, what can you do?

Oxford Mail:

Depression is not a single entity and there are all sorts of different ways to deal with this stuff.

The book brings everything up to date and is full of case studies, from plumbers to professors.

The book isn’t big, it’s something readable and that you can almost whizz through – the accessibility of it is the most important thing.

I feel very strongly that the public is cheated, there aren’t things out there that the average person can access, apart from what gets churned out by the universities.

The book was going to press prior to Covid but there’s now a postscript in the book, covering aspects such as isolation and loneliness.

Some people even found that their relationships got better, and the whole underlying thing of the book is human relationships.

Human relationships can be very healing.

We all share identical properties that mark us out as human beings.

Even so, every person is unique: we are not clones.

It’s the same with depression – or perhaps more properly the depressions (plural) – because they manifest in so many different ways and under different circumstances, yet in essence remain the same.

Oxford Mail:

This is a simple enough observation, yet there appears to be little understanding of the condition – or conditions – among the general public, who tend to lump together all states of ‘feeling miserable’ into something to be snapped out of, a disease category to be treated medically, or a feebleness of personality to be disapproved of and dismissed.

In this new title, many different views on causation and treatment are explored.

The emphasis is on real (but disguised) people’s experiences of various sorts of depression, illustrating the interaction between the person’s private inner world and the outer one of partner, parent, family and friends.

The many forms of counselling with their theoretical underpinnings are described by use of real case material, in combination with or separate from the medical approach.

This is not a self help manual, but as the title suggests, a companion for anyone wanting to understand in more depth the complexities of these mood variations which are different to ordinary human unhappiness, with which they are so often and unfairly confused.

Wyn Bramley is a psychotherapist, group analyst and trainer. Now semi retired, her last official post was that of founder and director of Oxford University’s Masters programme in Psychodynamic studies.

Her latest book is titled Understanding the Depressions: A Companion for Sufferers, Relatives and Counsellors.