Appendix (4): Good Mood: The New Psychology of Overcoming Depression

Good Mood

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Good Mood:
The New Psychology
of Overcoming Depression

Chapter 4

cont.

Bad fortune may befall the normal person--perhaps death in the family, injury, marriage breakdown, money problems, loss of job, or a disaster to the community. The person's actual situation then is worse than before, and the comparison between actual and benchmark-hypothetical becomes more negative than before. The unfortunate event must be understood and interpreted in the context of the person's entire life situation. The normal person eventually perceives and interprets the event without distorting it or misinterpreting it to make it seem more terrible or permanent than it really is. And the normal person may suffer less pain and "accept" the event more easily than the depressive.

What then happens? There are several possibilities including: a) Circumstances may change of themselves. Bad health may improve or the individual may purposely alter the circumstances--find a new job, or another spouse or friend. b) The person may "get used to" his health disability or being without the loved one. That is, the person's expectations may change. This affects the hypothetical situation to which he compares his actual situation. And after the expectations of the normal person change in response to the change in circumstances, the hypothetical-comparison state again comes into balance with the actual state in such fashion that the comparison is not negative, and sadness no longer occurs. c) The normal person's goals may change. A basketball player who aimed to make the college team may suffer a spinal injury and be confined to a wheelchair. A "healthy" person's reaction is, after a time, to shift his goal to being a star on the wheelchair basketball team. This restores the balance between the hypothetical state and the actual state, and removes sadness.

David Hume, as great as any philosopher who ever lived, as well as a person of cheerful "normal" temperament, describes how he reacted when his first great book had a very disappointing reception:

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I had always entertained a notion that my want of success in publishing the Treatise of Human Nature, had proceeded more from the manner than the matter, and that I had been guilty of a very usual indiscretion, in going to the press too early. I therefore cast the first part of that work anew in the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, which was published while I was at Turin. But this piece was at first little more successful than the Treatise of Human Nature. On my return from Italy, I had the Mortification to find all England in a ferment, on account of Dr. Middleton's Free Enquiry, while my performance was entirely overlooked and neglected. A new edition, which had been published at London of my Essays, moral and political, met not with a much better reception.

Such is the force of natural temper, that these disappointments made little or no impression on me.(1)

"Normal" people do not, however, respond to misfortune by adapting so readily that their spirits are unaffected. A study that compared paraplegic accident victims to persons who had not suffered paralysis from accident found that the paraplegics remained less happy than the uninjured persons months after the accident2 Normal people may be flexible in adapting their thinking to their circumstances, but they are not perfectly flexible.

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