Sorrows Web or Pregnancy Week by Week

Sorrow's Web: Hope, Help, and Understanding for Depressed Mothers and Their Children

Author: Anne Sheffield

One of every four women suffers from depression at some point in her life, often during the prime childbearing years, yet most fail to recognize the telltale signs of this common, treatable illness and its potentially negative effects on the children of all ages. Drawing on her experience as both a child of a depressed mother and as a depressed mother herself, as well as on extensive research by experts in psychiatry, psychology, and child development, Books for a Better Life award winner Anne Sheffield offers advice on how to:

• recognize the symptoms of depression and protect children from their impact
• choose among the range of medical and psychotherapeutic options available
• outline a strategy for fathers that will help them and the marriage weather the crisis
• ensure that the illness does not return

As the first book to demystify, destigmatize, and humanize a long-taboo subject, Sorrow's Web points the way to sustaining and regaining a loving relationship between mother and child.

Publishers Weekly

In her second book, Sheffield (How You Can Survive When They're Depressed) zeroes in on the particular ravages of clinical depression combined with motherhood. Sandwiched between two generations of depressed women in her own family, she supplements interviews and expert findings (university studies that, she claims, never reach a general audience) with her intimate perspective on the disease. Often misdiagnosed or dismissed as "normal," depression--whether it takes the form of teenage angst, baby blues or elderly sadness due to the deaths of contemporaries--strikes one in four women. It affects everyone around its primary victim, including husbands (there's a chapter just for them) and, most detrimentally, children, who manifest its effects through anxiety, low self-esteem and poor school performance. Lauding medication as the first line of defense, the author recommends psychotherapy and family counseling only after the right drug or dosage has been established. While the cause of maternal depression is still far from certain, Sheffield points to heredity as the most likely suspect, with female sex hormones as a possible contributing factor, and offers hope that more answers will soon be forthcoming. (Oct.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Book about: Tea or First Impressions

Pregnancy Week by Week

Author: Alison Mackonochi

Features on conception, tests, classes, nutrition, choices, labor plan and pain relief.