The Mindful Way through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness - Mark         Williams, John D. Teasdale, Zindel V. Segal, Jon Kabat-Zinn This book isn't exactly a quick read, but it does a great job of explaining the way in which negative thinking patterns make (and keep) people depressed, and how to overcome them. Do you ever find yourself feeling bad about feeling bad? This book explains that such an approach just creates more suffering, and it's better to accept the first bad feeling without piling more bad feelings on top of it.

For the record, I do believe in medication and therapy (and use both), but I also find mindfulness invaluable. I don't think the two fields are incompatible. There's a limit to what you can learn about mindfulness from a book--I recommend seeing if your local mindfulness center has a beginner course available--but if you're going to, this book is a good place to start.

The "eight-week program" the book mentions isn't outlined until the very last chapter, so if you're just looking to jump into the practical side of mindfulness, skip to that chapter. It tells you which chapters in the book are related to each week of the program, so you can go back and read those at the appropriate times.

Study after study has shown that people who meditate regularly are healthier than those who don't, on both a physical and mental level. Don't discount it.