Tracy Thompson's Website

THE GHOST IN THE HOUSE:MOTHEROOD,RAISING CHILDREN AND STRUGGLING WITH DEPRESSION

"Much is now known about depression in mothers and how the illness affects the children and travels through the generations. Modern epidemiology, genetics and neuroscience are beginning to unpack the risks and causes. Tracy Thompson, a journalist and a mother who suffered from depression, has accessed this information and made it available to the public in a highly readable,current and humane book."-- Myrna Weissman PhD, Professor of Psychiatry and Epidemiology ,College of Physicians and Surgeons Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute

"Tracy Thompson has an uncanny ability to get at the experiential reality of depression. In this vital book, she achieves the same level of nuanced insight that made The Beast so compelling, and shows how maternal depression consumes the lives of mothers and their children. She looks at the guilt, the anger, the feelings of inadequacy, and the fear that characterize these relationships. Some women may benefit from the coping mechanisms she enumerates; for others, simply the revelation that they are not suffering alone may
be sufficient balm."--Andrew Sullivan, author of The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, winner of the 2001 National Book Award.

"Thompson draws on personal experience, survey responses, and research to investigate the phenomenon of maternal depression and its implications for children raised in households haunted by this invisible succubus. While recent books, like Brooke Shields’s popular Down Came the Rain: My Journey Through Postpartum Depression, begin to address aspects of this issue, Thompson manages to integrate multiple perspectives, demonstrating how children respond to and internalize their mother’s depression, be it a lifelong affliction or of the classic postpartum variety. She discusses symptoms of maternal depression, argues that the illness is underdiagnosed and therefore undertreated, and urges women to seek the treatment that will help them and their families function optimally."—Lynne Maxwell, Villanova University School of Law Library, writing for Library Journal Reviews.




THE BEAST: A RECKONING WITH DEPRESSION
(published in paperback as The Beast: A Journey Through Depression)

"Thompson has a skilled reporter's eye for detail and investigation, which she turns unmercifully upon herself here...The large and small lessons she shares here, and the medical knowledge she imparts, may prove lifesaving to readers faced with a similar predicament."--The San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle

"She gives a human face to the many stigmas of depression, describing the symptoms...with chilling immediacy."--The Washington Post

"In that resilient genre, the autobiography of melancholy, we hope for courage, honesty, and the texture of the particular. Tracy Thompson supplies all in generous measure."--Peter Kramer, author of Listening to Prozac and Against Depression.