In a field much given to ranting, [Dana Jack's] is a practical approach, and especially welcome for that reason. She provides factual information about the depressed women she has studied, and gives ample scope to their voices too. In an appendix, she even offers a questionnaire...The impression Silencing the Self leaves is of compassion geared to good sense. It is a serious book, advancing an argument of intrinsic significance.
   --Liam Hudson, Times Literary Supplement

Silencing the Self raises questions as fascinating as the answers it offers...What I found most compelling was the women's own voices. The conflicts and losses depressed women describe are different not only in degree from those felt by women who are not clinically depressed. That is why this book is relevant to anyone grappling with the central challenge of relationships: how to achieve connections to others without losing oneself.
   --Deborah Tannen, New York Times Book Review

Jack's study undoes some of the treachery [clinically depressed] women have endured by simply calling its name. And regardless of how much we believe things may have changed, the ravaged voices finally speaking in Silencing the Self are testimony otherwise.
   --Gail Caldwell, Boston Globe

Dana Crowley Jack offers new hypotheses [about women's depression] based on data gleaned from an intensive, longitudinal study of twelve clinically depressed women. Attending closely to the metaphors of loss and self-reproach these women use to describe their lives and their intimate relationships, Jack identifies a 'loss of self' as the most salient feature of female depression...[A] dazzling array of insights...[Jack] has provided a lucid and valuable book.
   --Sharland Trotter, Women's Review of Books

In Silencing the Self, Jack points out that women's legitimate needs for intimacy have too often been negatively perceived as expressions of dependency. Resultant 'self-silencing' behavior--like the suppression of anger in relationships--often triggers the plunge of depression. The voices of Jack's former patients provide dynamic and hands-on proof of her compelling thesis.
   --Lisa Shea, Mirabella

Jack's thorough, just, and tough-minded critique of the literature on depression shows how our very methodology has served to 'silence' women's selves, in spite of evidence for the accuracy of their experiential reports. Instead of accepting conventional definitions of 'passivity,' 'dependence,' and the like-many of which serve to denigrate women-Jack elucidates the women's own meanings for these terms. This is a very important book.
   --Blythe Clinchy, coauthor of Women's Ways of Knowing

Dana Crowley Jack teaches at Fairhaven, an interdisciplinary college of Western Washington University.

Read More by Dana Crowley Jack:

• Behind the Mask: Destruction and Creativity in Women's Aggression