Читать книгу Depression at a psychologist from Russia: history and treatment. Life, Illness, Science, and Job search - - Страница 3

A book about how a practicing clinical psychologist, a candidate of psychological sciences, fell into clinical depression, then learned that he had an autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and then underwent long and difficult treatment, and found ways to live like this.

Who is the book written for? I think the book is primarily addressed to people who are searching, active, striving to improve the quality of their lives, but who now and then “stumble” over mental difficulties. For example, if you are not yet morally ready to seek help from a specialist, perhaps I will help remove irrational anxiety and some prejudices regarding the culture of seeking help from psychiatrists and psychologists.

And if you are already undergoing psychotherapy or taking medications prescribed by a psychiatrist, but do not feel any improvement, then perhaps some of my thoughts based on personal experience on how to deal with this will be useful to you. The book may also be of professional interest to psychology students, psychiatrists and other representatives of helping professions, since the book describes in some detail the anamnesis of a person with depressive disorder, so there is an opportunity to better understand the way of thinking of such a person.

However, this book is to a greater extent autobiographical, and is woven from themes about addictions and coping with them, from themes about the romantic side of my life, from themes about the desire to find and understand myself as a person in a broad sense, about professional self-realization, it is also woven from themes about love for science and doing it. Therefore, in a sense, the book is a novel, since it describes the process of life of a contemporary.

Why or why was the book written? The driving force that led me to write the book is my mortality. I started writing at 35, when I was single, had no children, was not in a relationship, a year ago I stopped giving psychological consultations, and with varying success I am being treated for a mental illness. But I am alive. And the living have a need to say something, to tell, to ask, to share thoughts about the life they have lived. And I seem to be good at it. But there are no other people in my apartment, and I don’t have friends “24/7”, I can’t teach a child about life, and chat about how the day went, I can’t discuss with my life partner how life is in general, etc. And the reality is that a family may not happen in my life.

Therefore, I feel responsible for the life of the human being that I am, and in particular for his humanistic desire to tell someone about something important, from his point of view. Otherwise, it would be very annoying to leave, and take everything with me, without sharing my small realizations with other human beings. In addition, the very fact of working with the book gives me the opportunity to feel not so bad as, for example, it could be. And, of course, in this way I realize one of the meanings of my life, which I invented for myself.

The book uses foul language. Although I myself do not quite like this fact, but if I excluded it, the thread of the story about some stages of my life would be lost, the description would become incomplete and artificial because I have not found suitable substitutes for such vocabulary in the Russian language. But there is not much of it, and it can definitely be counted on the fingers of both hands.