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Book Review: Janet M. Stoppard and Linda M. McMullen (eds), Situating Sadness: Women and Depression in Social Context. New York and London: New York University Press, 2003. 228 pp

these. All of his participants were volunteers who had long histories of depression, and had been through several types of intervention. They were mostly female, aged between 20 and 50, college educated, white, single, and more than half had experienced a psychiatric hospitalization. Persons from different age groups and different racial and ethnic backgrounds might tell different stories. It might also have been beneficial for Karp to utilize a second person in his data analysis to see if his identified themes were only one of several possibilities. Still, if as Karp writes at the end of the book, ‘The ultimate test of a study’s worth is that the findings ring true to peoples and let them see things in new ways’ (p. 202), his book is a major success. I recommend this book to all practicing human service professionals, as it provides a rare glimpse into the complex world of persons who cope with depression through much of their lives. (In fact, it is now a required text in my graduate level human behavior course.) At one point Karp writes ‘Anything I write on these pages misses much of the interview’s energy and emotion’ (p. 143). My reaction to that statement is that it is up to me as a practitioner to seek the same depth of these interviews in my own work with persons (my clients) who have depression. The book provides no ‘answers’ to the ‘problem’ of depression, but it illuminates the experience better than anything else that has come before. For those of us who are practitioners, it warns us to resist simple labeling of depression or many other emotional challenges as biochemical or even psychological in nature, and reminds us that we need to attend to the whole person in ways that the social work profession (and others) seems to be moving away from. The book also reminds me of the special power of qualitative research in appreciating the complexity of the human condition. And I hope that the psychiatrist who attended my in-service panel presentation 15 years ago reads this.