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 3 Negative Self-Comparisons, Combined With A Helpless Feeling, Are The Proximate Cause of Depression

Roadmap Note: The book is organized so that you can go directly from the overall summary in Chapter 1 to the get-to-work self-help procedures in Part III (Chapters 10 to 20), without pausing to read further about the nature of depression and its elements in Part II (Chapters 3 to 9). But if you have the patience to study a bit more before moving on the self-help procedures, it will be worth your while to first read through Part II, which expands greatly on Chapter 1. Or, you can come back and read the rest of Part II later. ***

When you are depressed you feel sad; this is the basic fact about the condition called "depression." The feeling of sadness is accompanied by the thought "I'm worthless." An attitude of "I'm helpless" is a precursor of the sadness, and the belief "I ought to be different than I am" usually helps keep the person locked into sadness. Our first task, then, is to understand sadness--to learn what causes sadness, what relieves sadness, and what prevents sadness.

The Importance of Negative Self-Comparisons

Attempts to distinguish `normal' from `abnormal' sadness have not proven useful. Apparently there is but a single sort of sad feeling; the pain is the same whether it follows upon the loss of a friend (a "normal" event) or, say, the keenly-felt loss of an honor which it was not reasonable for you to expect but which you had nevertheless set your heart on. This makes sense when we notice that one does not distinguish between the pain from a finger that got cut in an accident, and the pain of a self-inflicted cut on the finger. The contexts are very different, however, in the cases of the two sorts of loss mentioned above, and it is those contexts that distinguish between the depressed person and the person who suffers from a "normal" sadness.

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We must know, then: Why does one person respond to a particular negative event in his/her life with short-lived sadness after which normal cheerful life reappears, whereas another responds to a similar event with persistent depression? And why does a trivial or almost nonexistent blemish in life trigger sadness in some people and not in others?

The answer in brief is as follows: Some people acquire from their personal histories: 1) a tendency to make frequent negative self-comparisons, and therefore a tendency to have a Rotten Mood Ratio; 2) a tendency to think one is helpless to change the events that enter into the Rotten Ratio; and 3) a tendency to insist that one's life should be better than it is.

Concerning the first of these elements, the tendency to make frequent negative self-comparisons: This does not mean quite the same as "thinking poorly of yourself" or "having low self- esteem." The differences will be explained later.

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