The Emotional Calendar

A thoughtful psychiatrist puts together a potpourri of information and empowering advice about how our emotional states can be influenced by seasonal weather changes, cultural views of certain months, and anniversaries of difficult past experiences. Some depressive disorders can cause reactions to different types of weather or changes in the amount of daylight. People can also develop emotional sensitivities to milestones such as certain holidays or the end of the football season. Arthur Morey's steady performance makes him sound like an urbane, highly educated psychiatrist. His reading is at once reserved and amicably engaged with the author's warmth and helpful intentions. Full of interesting anecdotes and cultural references, the program strikes a perfect balance between being a comprehensive mental health guide and a poetic journey through some interesting facets of human emotion. T.W. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

November 8, 2010
Psychiatrist Sharp, professor at Harvard and UCLA medical school, combines insights from clinical and social psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, and medicine to explore how seasonal factors affect our psychological lives. He successfully describes such phenomena as seasonable adjustment disorder and offers many intriguing facts—for example, he notes that summer is the season when people feel most free, yet also the time of the most suicides. Unfortunately, Sharp attempts to cover too many topics, which often leads to meandering digressions—as in a section on "seasonal creep" in sports. Other times he states the obvious: regarding Valentine's Day, he writes, "for those in relationships, it can be a time of heightened expectations... while people without significant others face feelings of loneliness." Sharp also skimps on describing coping strategies, often offering little more than a paragraph on each of his recommendations. Sharp's book concludes with sections on medications and natural remedies for anxiety and depression, and a cheery chapter on "seasonal embrace." Readers may glean something helpful from the scientific and anecdotal material, but too much of this book is psych lite.