C's Reviews > The Upward Spiral: Using Neuroscience to Reverse the Course of Depression, One Small Change at a Time

The narration of the audiobook sounded like a chipper Christian Slater reading a Dale Carnegie book.

Some pieces of "advice" jumped out at me and were jarringly simplistic and dismissive. The first big one was a statement to the effect of: if you had these healthy coping habits in place, you wouldn't be depressed in the first place. Huh. It sounds like you just blamed people for their depression and anxiety because they're not doing the usual checklist of stuff.

There was another segment where the author says that when he's worrying about something or anxious, he asks, "IS that something to worry about? No?" and then is able to let it go and continue on chopping his vegetables. I mean, that's great for him, but kind of cutesy.

I shut the book off, because I realized I was actually gritting my teeth after that point and that did not feel healthy. So, my healthy coping mechanism take-away: don't listen to self-help books that aren't actually helping you. They might help others, but if they're not helping you -move on.