Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy - David D. Burns

Absolutely fantastic. The concepts are highly rational and compatible with a LessWrong worldview and are explained very well. The guy writes in a really friendly, likeable style. He does an excellent job arguing with the hypothetical depressed reader and logically convincing him that the beliefs he firmly holds are maladaptive and wrong, without expecting him to "just think more positively" or anything similar.

The principles explained in the book are those of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which is the only form of psychotherapy proven to work better than placebo. Essentially what CBT says (if I correctly understand it) is that depression essentially is a form of irrational thinking, specifically ten specific irrational thinking patterns, called "cognitive distortions". These include things like "overgeneralization", where a depressed person will do a small thing wrong and conclude that everything they do is wrong, or "mind reading", where a depressed person will insist that somebody hates them or is thinking negative things about them, without proof to back it up. The book explains how to notice and counter those biases in yourself.

Personally, I have been increasingly overcoming depression for maybe the past four years or so, and I read this book far too late when I was mostly all the way out of the pit. I would say my mood has improved a little in the three months since I read this book.

I would highly recommend this to anyone who is depressed at all, and I would mildly recommend this to anyone else.