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

cont.

Just about every evaluation you make boils down to a comparison. "I'm tall" must be with reference to some group of people; a Japanese who would say "I'm tall" in Japan might not say that in the U. S. If you say "I'm good at tennis", the hearer will ask, "Whom do you play with, and whom do you beat?" in order to understand what you mean. Similarly, "I never do anything right" , or "I'm a terrible mother" is hardly meaningful without some standard of comparison.

The psychologist Helson put it this way: "[All judgments (not only judgments of magnitude) are relative." Without a standard of comparison, you cannot make judgments.8.1 [Harry Helson, Adaptation-Level Theory (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), p. 126]

An example of how one cannot communicate factual knowledge without making comparisons is my attempt in the Epilogue to describe to you the depth of my depression. It is only by comparing it to something else that you might understand from your own experience--time in jail, or having a tooth pulled--that I can give you any reasonable idea of how my depression felt. And communicating factual knowledge to oneself is not basically different from communicating with others; without comparisons you cannot communicate to yourself the information (true or false) that leads to sadness and eventually to depression.

The Old and New Views of Depression

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Now the difference between this view of depression and that of traditional Freudian psychotherapy is clear: Traditional psychotherapists, from Freud on, believe that negative self- comparisons (or rather, what they call "low self-esteem") and sadness both are symptoms of the underlying causes, rather than the negative self-comparisons causing the sadness; their view is shown in Figure 1. Therefore, traditional psychotherapists believe that one cannot affect depression by directly altering the kinds of thoughts that are in one's consciousness, that is, by removing negative self-comparisons. Additionally, they believe that you are not likely to cure yourself or ameliorate your depression in any simple direct way by altering the contents of your thoughts and ways of thinking, because they believe that unconscious mental elements influence behavior. Rather, they believe that you can only remove the depression by reworking the events and memories in your early life that led you to have a propensity to be depressed.

Figure 1

In direct contrast is the cognitive viewpoint of this book as shown in Figure 2. Negative self-comparisons operate between the underlying causes and the pain, which (in the presence of a sense of being helpless) cause sadness. Therefore, if one can remove or reduce the negative self-comparisons, one can then cure or reduce the depression.

Note: The rest of this chapter is rather technical, and intended mainly for professionals. Laypersons may well skip to the next chapter. Professionals will find additional technical discussion in the Postscript for the Professional Reader at the end of the book.

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