Eating, Drinking, Overthinking: The Toxic Triangle of Food, Alcohol, and Depression--and How Women Can Break Free » (Reprint)

Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, Ph.D., is a professor of psychology at Yale University. She has been conducting award-winning research on women's mental health for twenty years and has received funding from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the William T. Grant Foundation. She and her research have been profiled on the Today show and in The New York Times.

A noted expert on women and depression offers a guide to balancing women's relationship to eating, alcohol, and overthinking

Based on extensive original research, Eating, Drinking, Overthinking is the first book to show women how they can navigate the often painful and destructive worlds of the title.

While it is widely known that women suffer from depression in disproportionately large numbers, what is less well known is the extent to which many women use food and alcohol to regulate their moods. Integrating the insights of her popular first book, Women Who Think Too Much, Yale psychologist Susan Nolen-Hoeksema has written a pathbreaking and highly readable account of the ways in which eating, drinking, and overthinking, can wreak havoc on women's emotional well-being, physical health, relationships, and careers.

As Eating, Drinking, Overthinking reveals, the coping strategies that lead women into the "toxic triangle" can be turned around to guide them out of it. Instead of letting negative thoughts gain the advantage, Nolen-Hoeksema provides exercises to help women manage their thoughts and maintain a balanced perspective.

Publishers Weekly

Nolen-Hoeksema (Women Who Think Too Much) presents a theory that women who battle eating disorders, alcohol abuse and depression are really suffering from a single disorder for which she has coined the term "toxic triangle." The author claims to be among the first to recognize this (most experts, she says, choose one as the cause of the other two), but doesn't offer anything beyond her own observations as proof that this is true. The book's main strength is its excellent exploration of the impact of all three problems, individually and collectively, on women's lives. Eating disorders, alcohol abuse and depression affect women's relationships, careers, health and put them at risk for assault. Nolen-Hoeksema helps readers make sense of their past experiences and the genetic influences that can also make a difference, perhaps leading to a better understanding of their behavior. But she flounders between writing a clinical dissertation and penning a self-help book meant to guide readers to a solution. She constantly switches voices, speaking directly to the reader at some points and talking about the reader at others. Nolen-Hoeksema makes a provocative argument, but the book's lack of clinical research and cohesive narrative make it a tough sell. (Jan.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.