Healing in the desert, by Christine D’Clario 

'A conflicted review - lots to commend here, but ultimately I wouldn't recommend to someone struggling in these areas'

Healing in the desert: Finding your voice on the journey from brokenness to freedom
By Christine D’Clario
David C Cook
ISBN: 978-0-8307-9149-1
Reviewed by: Jeannie Kendall 

 

I am deeply conflicted as I write this review. There is within this book a lot of information about depression in particular and other aspects of mental health such as anxiety and stress. The writer is honest about her own struggle with depression and it is pleasing to read a Christian writer commending therapy. It is a brave and personal account. It is steeped in the Bible in many ways. These are all good and important things.

However, one of the things I often ask myself in reading a book for review is ‘who might I recommend this book to?’ The obvious answer would be ‘someone who is struggling in these areas’.

Sadly, I do not feel that I could do so. The basic premise which occurs throughout the book is that we choose healing. I do believe we make choices in a journey to healing: to accept medication, seek counselling etc.

But that the healing itself is a choice I cannot subscribe to, as it implies if we are not healed that we did not make that choice.

Similarly, the author talks about the cost of healing, but again, if we are not healed does that suggest it was because we were not prepared to pay that cost?

There is some useful information on the stress cycle, but what if that cycle cannot be closed, as the writer suggests we need to?

Towards the end of the book there is a long section on what it looks like if we are not close to God. It is expressed as a reference not a judgement, but I suspect the latter is exactly how it would be experienced by someone in the depths of depression. Those things, and the dense writing, means I would not feel able to recommend it to someone who is depressed, but are also the reasons why I would not recommend it to helpers either.

A pity, as I feel there could have been the bones of a helpful book here. It does not, I am sad to say, reach that potential for this reviewer as it stands.
 

Jeannie Kendall is a ‘retired’ Baptist minister, speaker, trainer and until recently a tutor in Pastoral Supervision. She is the author of four books and is currently working on a fifth, a devotional book covering the whole of Luke’s gospel.