This book provides an erudite overview of the many dimensions of research and clinical practice in the characterisation, detection, assessment and management of depressive symptoms. Particularly important, in my view, is the inclusion of the historical perspective, i.e. early views on the symptoms and causes of depression. Too often we are short-sighted, believing that all valid knowledge commenced with contemporary scientific work. Yet as overviewed in Chapter 1, many insights from earlier thinkers have led us to where we are today. This includes Freud's theorising that depression had a psychogenic root in a sense of loss, and Meyer, who in 1922 laid the foundations for understanding depression as having both biological and social aspects. This book embraces the view that there are many biological, psychological and social realms that contribute to our understanding of depression and it takes a systematic and scholarly approach to elucidating these.

The book highlights the immense challenge clinicians and researchers face in developing a universal model of the neural, cognitive and functional attributes of depression across ages, gender and culture. Care is taken to consider how sociocultural discrimination and adversity may influence depression rates as well as recognition that different racial and cultural groups may hold different traditions, cultural norms and linguistic characteristics that alter depressive symptomatology. Of course, this means that the development of a consistent neural blueprint of depression is especially challenging. For example, in the field of emotion perception there is evidence that responses to emotional faces are learned, and that cultural difference in emotion knowledge predicts patterns of brain activation. This challenges assumptions of the universality of emotion processing in the brain and has broader implications for understanding neural differences associated with depression.

As this book so eloquently discusses, there is no simple cognitive phenotype associated with depression. Impairments in attention and working memory, executive function and emotion regulation, learning and retrieval are frequently observed, but vary between individuals and studies. The question concerning the directional or possibly bi-directional relationship between cognitive function and depressive symptomatology is well considered. As emphasised in Chapter 6, the lack of longitudinal studies of cognitive function (and neuroimaging) and depressive symptoms hinders understanding of how vulnerabilities may lead to depressive states and what cognitive changes are consequential versus predictive.

The final two sections of the book provide a welcome practical overview of how to approach the assessment and management of the person with depression. Specific tasks, questionnaires and tests are reviewed for their suitability and the clinical acumen of the authors is evident in their practical suggestions and summations of the literature. The book concludes by overviewing a range of traditional through to cutting-edge treatment approaches. Overall, I consider this a comprehensive, evidenced-based essential on my bookshelf.