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

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.)