In addition to his new book, Unstuck: Your Guide to the Seven Stage Journey Out of Depression (Penguin, 2008), Dr. Gordon is the author of Comprehensive Cancer Care and Manifesto for a New Medicine, and has also written or edited nine other books, including the award-winning Health for the Whole Person, and more than 120 articles in professional journals and general magazines and newspapers, among them the American Journal of Psychiatry, Psychiatry, American Family Physician, Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. His work has been featured on Good Morning America, The Today Show, CNN, CBS Sunday Morning, Fox News and National Public Radio, as well as in The Washington Post, USA Today, Newsweek, People, Town and Country, Hippocrates, Psychology Today, Vegetarian Times, Natural Health, Health and Prevention.

A graduate of Harvard University and Harvard Medical School, he was for ten years a research psychiatrist at the National Institute of Mental Health. There he developed the first national program for runaway and homeless youth, edited the first comprehensive studies of alternative and holistic medicine, directed the Special Study on Alternative Services for President Carter’s Commission on Mental Health, and created a nationwide preceptorship program for medical students. Through the Center for Mind-Body Medicine, Dr. Gordon has created ground-breaking programs of comprehensive mind-body healing for physicians, medical students and other health professionals; for people with cancer, depression and other chronic illnesses; and for traumatized children and families, and those who serve them, in Bosnia, Kosovo, Israel, Gaza, post-9/11 New York City, and post-Katrina southern Louisiana.

Unstuck, Dr. Gordon’s newest book, focuses on his holistic, non-drug based model for helping people with depression, who Gordon believes have been ill-served by conventional medicine. He is critical of the tendency of many doctors to quickly prescribe antidepressant medications while devoting little or no time to exploring the life events that led to the depression. He feels strongly that doctors need to engender hope and empowerment in patients to help them to move through and out of depression. He offers Unstuck as a manual for implementing these goals.

In this interview with Dr. Daniel Redwood, Dr. Gordon explains the limitations of viewing depression as a disease, describes the various aspects of his program, tells the story of a patient’s dramatic positive response, explains the importance of physical exercise for depressed people, and discusses a variety of circumstances in which he has applied his methods, including his work in Kosovo during and after the 1999 war there.

The current conventional medical model asserts that depression is a disease that can be treated effectively with medications. A central theme in your book is that depression is not a disease but a call to change something in one’s life. Please begin at the beginning and explain how you reached this opinion.

The beginning for me was when I was in medical school. I was working on a psychiatric ward and it just hit me that the folks on the psychiatric ward didn’t look much like the folks on the medical ward or the surgical ward. They didn’t look sick, just more or less like me and the other people who worked on the ward. And yet they were being put in pajamas (which is what they used to do in psychiatric wards). I thought to myself, this is very strange.