[James S. Gordon, MD, a Harvard educated psychiatrist, is a world-renowned expert in using mind-body medicine to heal depression, anxiety, and psychological trauma. He is the Founder and Director of The Center for Mind-Body Medicine, Dean of the Graduate School of Mind-Body Medicine at Saybrook University, a Clinical Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Family Medicine at Georgetown Medical School, and recently served as Chairman of the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy. Dr. Gordon has devoted over 40 years to the exploration and practice of mind-body medicine. After graduating Harvard Medical School, he was for 10 years a research psychiatrist at the National Institute of Mental Health. Dr. Gordon s most recent book is Unstuck: Your Guide to the Seven Stage Journey Out of Depression (Penguin Press) is a ground breaking, inspiring, practical guide to that healing journey. Website:

From the Preface: Depression is not a disease the end point of a pathological process. It is a sign that our lives are out of balance that we're stuck. It s a wake-up call and the start of a journey that can help us become whole and happy a journey that can change and transform our lives.

This book will challenge the prevailing medical model of depression and the widespread - even epidemic - use of chemical antidepressants. This narrow model of diagnosis and treatment insists that those who feel helpless and hopeless, unhappy and uncertain, have a disease like insulin dependent diabetes that requires pharmacological treatment. I'll offer you evidence that strongly suggests that this model is poorly justified, largely inappropriate, limited and limiting, and often enough dangerous to your physical emotional and spiritual health. The antidepressants that it dictates should be seldom - as a last resort - and generally briefly, not as a form of primary care.

What I'm sharing with you here is a newer more hopeful and far more comprehensive and effective model for healing depression - both the clinical depression that is diagnosed in sixteen to eighteen million Americans each year and chronic, low-grade dissatisfaction, unhappiness and anxiety that affect so many more of us. It's a model you can start to use right now, one that will meet your unique individual needs and give you positive results that you can begin to experience immediately.

This Unstuck approach marries modem science with the perennial wisdom of the world's great psychological and spiritual traditions. It makes use of the remarkable capacity each of us have to recover - physically, emotionally, spiritually - from the hurts and trauma we have experienced to transform our fears into teachers and to restore and renew our brain body mind and spirit.

From Chapter One: "Is There Some Other Way?" Hero's Healing Journey: Becoming Unstuck: Healing depression -- overcoming unhappiness means dealing more effectively with stress; recovering physical and psychological balance; reclaiming the parts of ourselves that have been ignored or suppressed; and appreciating the wholeness, the integrity that has somehow slipped away from us or that we have never really known. But this healing is dynamic and expansive as well as integrative, not just a series of tasks, but an adventure.

Depression almost always brings with it - along with the sense of loss and inadequacy of gloom and uncertainty - a feeling of immobility of stuckness. It feels as we've broken down alone and lonely in some dismal, charmless backwater that no one would ever choose to visit. The beginning of the end of depression comes when we recognize this place and see it not as the end but a beginning a starting point for the journey through and beyond depression confusion and despair toward wholeness and healing and delight.

This uncertain challenging journey is, I believe, the life defining path which leads us to who we really are who we are meant to be. And it is in many ways like the journeys that have defined our culture and the modem ones that impress and inspire us: Moses' painful pilgrimage, Jesus' mission, Mohammed's flight; the trials of confinement and the later life challenges of contemporary heroes like Mahatma Gandhi, Senator John McCain and Nelson Mandela; the hard-won authority of poet Maya Angelou and television teacher Oprah Winfrey; the steadfast marches of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The ancient Greek poem "The Odyssey" 8the model for both our classic novels of self-discovery and our modem adventure and mystery stories - is the tale of a man full of woe who finally finds his way home and to wholeness.

These historic and heroic figures are taking, as mythologist Joseph Campbell and psychiatrist Carl Jung before him pointed out, "archetypal journeys" - journeys that reflect and embody timeless truths of human experience. Their stories can encourage us to accept rather than flee from the challenges that confront us to relax with, rather than tense against our terror. They show us that patience and courage awareness creativity and judicious action can transform suffering. And they tell us that grace - mysterious, sweet, unmerited blessings - may always be available if we but pay attention. These heroes and their stories also remind us that others have been there before, that we are not alone.

The journey we take in depression, out of unhappiness, is mostly an internal one; travel and adventure, will and action, and retreats from our customary world, can also be valuable parts of it. The limitations on us, the threats to our well-being, our integrity and our sanity are not likely to be from ferocious pharaohs or sadistic jailers. They come from within ourselves; from the losses and hurt and fear we have suffered; from our internalization of the commands and constrictions - real and imagined - of our parents and our society. These wounds and limitations manifest in our relationships to those we love and care for and work with; in the work we do and the play we permit ourselves. They are personal and often very private. Still in pulling ourselves from the swamp of our unhappiness in navigating the straits of our fears and moving beyond self-imposed limitations in our minds and bodies and in our present circumstances, we are making an effort and taking a journey that is every bit as difficult, and as healing and heroic as any that humans have taken or can take.

The Seven Stages of the Healing Journey: There are seven stages on this journey. They are - in one form or another - as old as recorded history. My discussion of these stages draws on the sequence that Campbell observed in scriptures and myths and described in The Hero With a Thousand Faces on my own experience as a traveler on this journey and on my work with thousands of depressed and discouraged confused and conflicted people. They are:

1. The Call: the awareness that we are depressed and that some kind of change of journey is necessary;

II. Meeting Guides on the Path: meeting and choosing the men and women who can help and developing our own inner guidance and wisdom;

III. The Surrender to Change: allowing and encouraging ourselves to let go of what constrains and freezes us and to move into the current of life;

IV. Dealing with Demons: meeting the challenges - self-doubt loneliness procrastination pride resentment perfectionism fear with all its faces - guilt, shame, self-pity and all the others - and finding in them the unique demon - the genius of our own meaning purpose and direction;

V. The Dark Night of the Soul: allowing and inviting, as we move through the despair that may come to any of us, the deepest life-giving freedom to emerge;

VI. The Blessing: experiencing the unity and peace, the love and generosity the connection to something or someone greater than ourselves that can transform our lives;

VII. The Return: learning to live every day joyously, deeply, consciously with ourselves and others in the light of what we have experienced and are always learning.

In Unstuck's next seven chapters I'll give practical guidance and specific techniques to use at each stage of the journey (how to hear and answer the Call and choose your Guides relax into life and learn from rather than resist and be defeated by demons). And I'll provide physical mental emotional and spiritual nourishment that can sustain each of you on your path - instruction in meditation and guided imagery that will quiet your anxiety, raise your energy, promote understanding and improve your mood; detailed' information about safe physiologically balancing, mood lifting supplements and herbs; insights that can change the way you look at your life; movies and music and stories about ancient heroes and the ordinary present-time ones who populate my consulting room stories that can move and instruct you inspire you and open the door to your own heroic possibilities to your own healing.

Not all of you will experience all of the stages or experience them in the order I describe. Some of you may feel despair in the first hours of the Call and others may have moments of great and spacious peace while you struggle with your demons. Guides are always appearing. And challenges that are strenuous, difficult, daunting, even overwhelming, can after some struggle or in moments of grace become richly rewarding fascinating and even funny.

This book is written for all those who are clinically depressed - who can't get out of bed in the morning, eat incessantly or not at all, who know that the glass is half empty, who feel that life has failed you and you it, and that it will always be this way. It's also for and is about all of you who may just feel stuck or overburdened or unhappy or dissatisfied for any of us who may wonder "Where am I going?" and "Am I ever going to feel better?" or "Why am I here?" "What is my purpose?"

Unstuck is meant to be as useful for the ordinarily unhappy and confused as for the obviously depressed. On the journey toward wholeness all of us must meet similar challenges and proceed with similar care and attention and courage.

If you flee from and suppress the symptoms of depression - with drugs and denial- you run the risk of remaining stuck in self-defeating and repetitive patterns in habits and ideas and ways of relating to others that no longer serve you. If you see and embrace each stage of the journey and each challenge as your teacher - as an opportunity to see what you've been ignoring and need to know - you enter another more spacious, life-sustaining universe. Now you can recover parts of yourself that have been denied; stretch and grow in ways that further your development as a human being; reach out in ways that offer and inspire love. Now powerful change and healing can and will come.