Darkness Before Dawn : Redefining the Journey Through Depression

There’s no shortage of psychology self-help books on depression—but this collection, envisioned and edited by Sounds True founder Tami Simon, is not one of them.


You won’t be revisiting familiar therapies or antidepressant options. What you will find is a gathering of 16 exceptional and compassionate teachers who have faced profound depression themselves. Their purpose? To radically shift the way that we perceive the experience. To offer insights and practices that reach beyond conventional models. And to help us receive depression’s uninvited yet singular gifts.


The guidance presented here supports traditional psychotherapy and medication as valuable tools. But for those who’ve found these approaches incomplete—or seek to help others at an impasse—there’s much to discover within these pages, including:


Thomas Moore, PhD, on Saturn’s gifts; Sally Kempton on shifting from suffering and into witnessing awareness; poet Mark Nepo on embracing both emptiness and aliveness; Mary Pipher, PhD, on how despair can open us to long-hidden joy; Christina Baldwin on "ineffable sorrow"; Parker J. Palmer, PhD, on finding meaning and connection through the experience of depression; plus exceptional contributions by Ann Marie Chiasson, MD; James Gordon, MD; Sandra Ingerman; Karla McLaren; Robert Augustus Masters, PhD; Amy Weintraub; Jeff Foster; Elizabeth Rabia Roberts, EdD; Michael Bernard Beckwith; and Reginald A. Ray, PhD.

“I only wish that this book had been available to me during my own darktimes. I will be recommending it to all of my Mentees, my patients, friends, colleagues, all beings who journey through depression. Most important…I will be recommending it to those who have NEVER been through Depression as I believe that this is a book that has the power to open the eyes of our whole society to this journey of the Darkness Before Dawn.” —Lonnie DeSorcy, LifeForce Yoga

“We need a nuanced approach, one that takes depression out of the purely medical category and enables us to see, each one of us in our own life, what depression is asking of us and, maybe, what it is even offering.” —Tami Simon, from the Introduction