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Ways to Overcome Depression
Conquering Depression, Enjoying Life
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Conquering Depression
Enjoying Life

Julian L. Simon

cont.

The most convincing proof that sadness is caused by the unfavorable comparison of actual and counterfactual situations is your own introspections. Check and you will observe negative self-comparisons prominent in your thoughts when you are sad--whether the sadness is part of a general depression or not. And there is now a good-sized body of technical studies showing that what are commonly called "negative thoughts" accompany depression and are unusually common among people who have a propensity for depression.

Only this analysis makes sense of such exceptional situations as the person who is poor in the world's goods but nevertheless is happy, and the person who "has everything" but is miserable; not only their actual situations affect their feelings, but also the benchmark comparisons they set up for themselves.

The sense of loss--which often is associated with the onset of depression--also is a negative comparison, a comparison between the way things were and the way they are now. A person who never had a fortune does not experience the loss of a fortune in a stock market crash, and does not suffer grief there from.

Before we discuss how you can manipulate the Mood Ratio in order to remove depression, let us compare this view of depression with the conventional psychological views of depression.

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Freud and his followers--who until the past few decades dominated psychological thinking about depression in the twentieth century, have viewed depression simply as a result of loss. "Melancholy is in some way related to an unconscious loss of a love object, in contra distinction to mourning, in which there is nothing unconscious about the loss.... In grief the world becomes poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself that becomes poor and empty" (l9l7-l925, p. l55). Freud arrived at this idea because he observed great similarity between the depression of people grieving after a death, and other depressives. But the idea of loss by itself is not useful as the central concept in understanding depression. Unless one employs a tortured logic, the notion of loss does not fit the psychological states of many depressives. For example, being convinced that one is of low moral character can feed one's depression, but it is not a loss in any meaningful sense; the person probably does not think of him/herself as ever having had the high level of morality that is the benchmark for the negative self-comparison. A Freudian may find a way to define this comparison as a loss, but such reasoning only confuses the issue.

The psychoanalysts then joined the Freudian notion of loss to the observed fact that people whose parents die, desert them, or cut them off emotionally in childhood, have a higher likelihood of adult depression than do other people. This observation was then combined with a medical approach to depression as an ailment that should be treated by dealing with the root cause of the childhood loss. This view of depression and its cure are diagrammed in Figure l. In this scheme, both the sadness and the negative self- comparisons are seen as symptoms of the underlying causes.

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