Leon Cytryn

Sporting a cover that looks like Back to the Future's Lea Thompson posed for it, Growing Up Sad: Childhood Depression and Its Treatment is a work every parent should read.

In year 2000 on Monday, April 10, after I purchased Growing Up Sad and began reading it, I was literally thrown back into my own childhood and quickly found myself bawling like Wesley Snipes at an IRS tax audit. Then for 7 years and 7 months Growing Up Sad grew dust while it waited on my library shelves.

Published in 1996, Growing Up Sad is a tiny bit dated but remains an excellent book on understanding childhood depression, coping with it, or better yet, preventing it entirely.

Biblical scholars tell us that JOB is the most ancient of all the books in the Bible. And knowing that Job himself suffered from depression we can see that the blues have been with us a very long time. It was so odd to read that at one time, medical science did not believe children could suffer from depression!

This is one of half a dozen books I have read about how the brain functions, but yet it is the first to clearly explain to me exactly how neuronal signals flow and how SSRI's work.

The book displays my old bugaboo, and that is superscripted footnotes throughout the text, however the vast majority of the nineteen pages in the back are reference notes only, so turning to them is rarely necessary.

Almost as if it was written for health care professionals, the pages are densely packed with medical and scientific terms. With highliter in hand and Webster's close by Growing Up Sad, is a book to be purposefully read.


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