The Mindfulness & Acceptance Workbook for Depression: Using acceptance & commitment therapy to move through depression & create a life worth living (includes CD)

Author(s): Kirk D. Strosahl PhD, Patricia J. Robinson PhD, Steven C. Hayes PhD

Depression, Anxiety & Stress | Acceptance & Mindfulness | Mindfulness | ACT Acceptance & Commitment Therapy | Mindfulness

There are hundreds of books on the market that try to help readers "overcome" or "put a stop to" depression. But what if depression isn't a "thing" to be gotten rid of? What if depression is a behavior that, in the context of the life of someone who is depressed, serves an important function or acts as a signal that something needs to change? Learning to understand the function and interpret the signal of depression, then, would be a much more important goal than finding out how to simply make it go away. Living well even with feelings of depression would be a more productive, and probably more attainable, goal. This workbook marks a major development in the treatment of depression. Based on acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), this book offers a new approach to depression. The central idea is that feelings of depression are not problems in themselves. What is a serious problem is the avoidance of pleasurable, productive activities. At first, depression may set the sufferer up for this avoidance, but sooner or later the process becomes a cycle, and the avoidance behaviors start causing more depressed feelings. When readers use the techniques in this book to evaluate their own experiences of depression, they will find out how to make changes that may or may not decrease their depressed feelings but will most certainly enrich and improve their total life experience. Includes CD with guided imagery & mindfulness exercises.


Product Information

Kirk D. Strosahl, PhD, is cofounder of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), a cognitive behavioral approach that has gained widespread adoption in the mental health and substance-abuse communities. He is coauthor of Brief Interventions for Radical Change and In This Moment. Strosahl provides training and consultation services for Mountainview Consulting Group, Inc. He is a pioneer in the movement to bring behavioral health services into primary care. He resides in Portland, OR.


Patricia J. Robinson, PhD, is director of training and program evaluation at Mountainview Consulting Group, Inc., a firm that assists health care systems with integrating behavioral health services into primary care settings. She is coauthor of Real Behavior Change in Primary Care and The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Depression. After exploring primary care psychology as a researcher, she devoted her efforts to its dissemination in rural America, urban public health departments, and military medical treatment facilities. Robinson resides in Portland, OR.


Steven C. Hayes, PhD, is Nevada Foundation Professor in the department of psychology at the University of Nevada, Reno. An author of forty-one books and more than 575 scientific articles, he has shown in his research how language and thought leads to human suffering. He is codeveloper of ACT, a powerful therapy method that is useful in a wide variety of areas.

General Fields

  • : 9781572245488
  • : New Harbinger Publications
  • : New Harbinger Publications
  • : August 2008
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Kirk D. Strosahl PhD, Patricia J. Robinson PhD, Steven C. Hayes PhD
  • : Paperback
  • : 616.8527
  • : JM
  • : Illustrations