Happiness Is a Choice Books Review

There are two books dealing with the topic – Happiness is a choice and they have the same title oddly enough although one has an appendage to the main topic.

One of the books is written by Frank Minirth along with Paul Meier and the second book is authored by Barry Neil Kaufman. 

On the surface the title of the books may give the wrong impression as though unhappy or depressed individuals choose to be that. That’s not quite the perspective of both books.

I will first talk about the book written by Frank Minirth and Paul Meier titled ‘Happiness Is a Choice’ – The Symptoms, Causes and Cures of Depression.

As the appendage to the title suggests, this book tackles the issue of depression in its entirety. Both authors are psychiatrists who have authored and co-authored other books dealing with the mind.

In this book, the authors bring their professional training, clinical experience as counsellors onto the table and quite literally succeeded in explaining in layman’s language the issue of depression.

Not very many authors have successfully dealt with this topic in an easy-to-understand manner like these two. They strongly believe that depressed individuals can eventually overcome emotional pain that results from the condition.

What is probably not known to a lot of people is depression is a lot more common than we think it is, because depression comes in various forms and affects people on different levels i.e mild or acute, temporary or persistent.

Readers of this book stand to learn a lot about the subject – the symptoms of depression, the sources of emotional pain, depression and dynamics of personality, dealing with anger and anxiety, treatments available etc.

The only thing to watch out for is that the authors did introduce a biblical and Christianity slant to the context because the tenous relationship between spiritual life and psychological health are tackled.

In the end basic steps for recovering from depression and consequently leading a happy and fulfilled life are provided. I think the book should appeal to both Christians and atheist alike but atheists who are not broad-minded may not be impressed.

Let me conclude this review by providing a comment by one user who left this comment on the amazon website.

Happiness Is a Choice ~ Barry Neil Kaufman

The other Happiness Is a Choice book is authored by Barry Neil Kaufman. Apart from being an author, Barry Kaufman is a therapist, motivational speaker and the co-founder of the Option Institute.

Barry believes that your life can be transformed if you change a simple belief or make an attitudinal change. He then devotes the first five chapters of this book to profess his philosophy and also provides stories of clients who have made this transformation successfully.

The most exciting part of the ‘happiness is a choice’ book which almost everyone who has read it talks about and rightly so is chapter six. Here Barry Kaufman gives us his short-cuts to happiness which is something self-help seekers admire.

He talks about not just making the choice to be happy but giving that choice the priority it deserves, acquiring the freedom to be yourself, learning to stop having regrets about the past and dealing with anxieties and concerns about the future.

Infact one other expert on the subject of happiness recommends to her readers to just buy the Happiness Is a Choice book and focus on chapter six.

She advises them to learn one short-cut and practice for a week, pick on another and practice for another week and by the end of the sixth week (there are six short-cuts), your level of happiness will be unsurpassed even if you have had disappointments, illnesses, physical and emotional setbacks.

To a large extent, Barry did do justice to the subject of happiness and he showed us in this book how to win in this game of life.

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