'I Had a Black Dog says with wit, insight, economy and complete understanding what other books take 300 pages to say. Brilliant and indispensable.' - Stephen Fry 'Finally, a book about depression that isn't a prescriptive self-help manual. Johnston's deftly expresses how lonely and isolating depression can be for sufferers. Poignant and humorous in equal measure.' Sunday Times There are many different breeds of Black Dog affecting millions of people from all walks of life. The Black Dog is an equal opportunity mongrel. It was Winston Churchill who popularized the phrase Black Dog to describe the bouts of depression he experienced for much of his life. Matthew Johnstone, a sufferer himself, has written and illustrated this moving and uplifting insight into what it is like to have a Black Dog as a companion and how he learned to tame it and bring it to heel.

As beautifully illustrated as it is touching, this second book from Matthew Johnstone, author of I Had a Black Dog, is written for those who care for those suffering from depression - friends, family members, colleagues, and even therapists. Using wonderful illustrations and the image of Churchill's infamous 'black dog', Matthew and his wife Ainsley offer a moving, inspirational and often humorous portrait of life with depression - not only for those suffering from it themselves, but for those close to them. Living with a Black Dog speaks directly to the carer and offers practical and sometimes tongue-in-cheek tips on helping the depression sufferer, such as 'Socks have little do with mental health. If people could just "snap out of it" they would.' and 'Encourage any form of regular exercise. Fitness robs the Dog of its power'. Based on their own experiences, Matthew and his wife Ainsley treat the subject of depression sympathetically, hopefully and, most importantly, humorously.

In a modern fairy tale about the power of fear and how it distorts our view of the world, the Black Dog that appears outside the Hope family's home seems to grow larger and larger as each frightened member of the Hope family sees it, but the youngest member of the household is not afraid and is able to break the spell.

Set in late 1980s Europe at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Black Dogs is the intimate story of the crumbling of Bernard and June Tremaine’s marriage, as witnessed by their son-in-law, Jeremy, who seeks to comprehend how their deep love could be defeated by ideological differences that seem irreconcilable. In writing June’s memoirs, Jeremy is led back to a moment, that was, for June, as devastating and irreversible in its consequences as the changes sweeping Europe in Jeremy’s own time. Ian McEwan weaves the sinister reality of civilization’s darkest moods—its black dogs—with the tensions that both create love and destroy it.

In 1988, shortly after moving from Sydney back to his birthplace in the rural New South Wales hamlet of Bunyah, Les Murray was struck with depression. In the months that followed, the "Black Dog" (as he calls it) ruled his life. He raged at his wife and children. He ducked a parking ticket on grounds of insanity, and begged a police officer to shoot him rather than arrest him. For days on end he lay in despair, a state in which, as he puts it precisely, "you feel beneath help." Killing the Black Dog is Murray's recollection of those awful days: brief, pointed, wise, and full of beauty in the way of his poetry. The prose text—delicately balanced between personal and informative—gives a glimpse of the imprint that depression can leave on a life. The accompanying poems show their roots in his crisis—a crisis from which, he reports toward the close of this poignant book, he has fully recovered. "My thinking is no longer jammed and sooty with resentment," he recalls. "I no longer wear only stretch-knit clothes and drawstring pants. I no longer come down with bouts of weeping or reasonless exhaustion. And I no longer seek rejection in a belief that only bitterly conceded praise is reliable." Killing the Black Dog is a crucial chapter in the life of an outstanding poet.

In a land where gods walk on the hills and goddesses rise from river, lake, and spring, the caravan-guard Holla-Sayan, escaping the bloody conquest of a lakeside town, stops to help an abandoned child and a dying dog. The girl, though, is the incarnation of Attalissa, goddess of Lissavakail, and the dog a shape-changing guardian spirit whose origins have been forgotten. Possessed and nearly driven mad by the Blackdog, Holla-Sayan flees to the desert road, taking the powerless avatar with him. Necromancy, treachery, massacres, rebellions, and gods dead or lost or mad, follow hard on the their heels. But it is Attalissa herself who may be the Blackdog’s—and Holla-Sayan’s—doom.

An insight into what it is like to live with the "Black Dog" and the strength and support that can be found within and around us to tame it.