Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 2002, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a psychologist. On her own admission she spent the first 40 years of her life being unhappy.

An experience she's put to good use in highly successful books about depression and how to deal with it.

Born in Australia, she came to this country more than 30 years ago,

where at the University of Sheffield, she began to gain a reputation for studying psychology

from the point of view of people's individual experiences

rather than general theory.

This has what's been the foundation of her success and the subject matter of her influential books.

She admits to being a maverick along the way, but one whose controversial ideas have gradually

received wide acceptance.

The cure for depression, she says, is not pills, but wisdom. She is Dorothy Rowe.

And does that wisdom Dorothy come from within or without? Do you need a therapist to show you where it is or to tell you what it is or can you do it

yourself? Most people as they get older acquire wisdom from their experience. We all

learn from our experience and we can learn from what other people tell us.

We learn a lot from the conversations we have.

But if you get into that black hole of depression, can you get yourself out of it? I've seen hundreds of people do that.

What by themselves? By themselves and by talking to people and trying to understand how they see themselves and then realizing that the way we see

ourselves in our world is a set of ideas. They're ideas that we've created and

we're free to change those ideas. So the thesis is that you've put yourself in that

black hole by perceiving yourself in the way that you do and therefore you can get yourself out of it?

It sounds cruel to say you put yourself in that hole

...