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

Good Mood

Home
About Julian Simon
Table of Contents
Ways to Overcome Depression
Conquering Depression, Enjoying Life
Download Chapter
Buy the Book

back to
depression community

send this page to a friend

Good Mood:
The New Psychology
of Overcoming Depression

Chapter 3

cont.

Freud pointed in the right direction when he talked about people avoiding pain and seeking pleasure. Nor was this purely a tautology in which what people chose to do is simply called pleasurable; painful events can be connected to chemical events within the body, as discussed in Chapter 2. This idea is helpful here because it helps us understand the relationship of a variety of mental illnesses to negative self-comparisons and the pain they cause.

Some of the possible responses to neg-comps and the consequent pain are as follows:

1) One can sometimes avoid pain by changing the real circumstances involved in the neg-comp; this is what the "normal", active, undepressed person does, and what the normal rat does who has not previously been subjected to shocks that it cannot escape(9). The absence of such purposive activity with respect to neg-comps because of a sense of helplessness to improve the situation is a crucial characteristic of sufferers from depression.

2) One can deal with the pain by getting angry, which tends to make you forget about the pain -- until after the rage subsides. Anger can also be useful in changing the circumstances. Anger arises in a situation where the person has not lost hope but feels frustrated in attempting to remove the source of the pain.

3) You can lie to yourself about the existing circumstances. Distortion of reality can avoid the pain of a neg-comp. But this can lead toward schizophrenia and paranoia.(10) A schizophrenic may fantasize that his actual state is different than it really is, and while believing that the fantasy is true the painful neg- comp is not in the person's mind. The irony of such distortion of reality to avoid the pain of a neg-comp is that the neg-comp itself may contain a distortion of reality; making the neg-comp more realistic would avoid the need for schizophrenic distortion of reality.(11)

4) Still another possible outcome is that the person assumes that he or she is helpless to do anything about it, and this produces sadness and eventually depression.

Other states of mind which are reactions to the psychological pain of neg-comps fit well with this view of depression.(12)

advertisement

1) The person suffering from anxiety compares an anticipated and feared outcome with a benchmark counterfactual; anxiety differs from depression in its uncertainty about the outcome, and perhaps also about the extent to which the person feels helpless to control the outcome.(13) People who are mainly depressed often suffer from anxiety, too, just as people who suffer from anxiety also have symptoms of depression from time to time(14). This is explained by the fact that a person who is "down" reflects on a variety of neg-comps, some of which focus on the past and present whereas others focus on the future; those neg-comps pertaining to the future are not only uncertain, but may sometimes be altered, which accounts for the state of arousal that characterizes anxiety, in contrast to the sadness that characterizes depression.

Beck(15) differentiates the two conditions by saying that "In depression the patient takes his interpretation and predictions as facts. In anxiety they are simply possibilities". I add that in depression an interpretation or prediction -- the negative self-comparison -- may be taken as fact, whereas in anxiety it is not assured but is only a possibility, because of the depressed person's feeling of helplessness to change the situation.

top | continued | site map | send page to friend
chapt. 3 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

HealthyPlace.com Depression Center Links
home ~ site map

HealthyPlace.com Homepage
Chat ~ Forums ~ Communities
HealthyPlace.com Films ~ HealthyPlace.com Radio ~ News
Site Map ~ Web Tour ~ Advertise ~ Email Us
send this page to a friend

We subscribe to the HONcode principles of the Health On the Net Foundation.