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.

2) Mania is the state in which the comparison between actual and benchmark states seems to be very large and positive, and often it is a state in which the person believes that she or he is able to control the situation. It is especially exciting because the person is not accustomed to positive comparisons. Mania is like the wildly-excited reaction of a poor kid who has never before been to a professional basketball game. In the face of an anticipated or actual positive comparison, a person who is not accustomed to making positive comparisons about his life tends to exaggerate its size and be more emotional about it than people who are accustomed to comparing themselves positively.

3) Dread refers to future events just as does anxiety, but in a state of dread the event is expected for sure, rather than being uncertain as in anxiety. One is anxious about whether one will miss the plane, but one dreads the moment when one finally gets there and has to perform an unpleasant task.

4) Apathy occurs when the person responds to the pain of neg-comps by giving up goals, so that there is no longer a neg- comp. But when this happens the joy and the spice go out of life. This may still be thought of as depression, and if so, it is a circumstance when depression occurs without sadness -- the only such circumstance that I know of.

The English psychiatrist John Bowlby observed a pattern in children aged 15 to 30 months of age who were separated from their mothers that fits with the relationships between types of responses to neg-comps outlined here. Bowlby labels the phases "Protest, Despair, and Detachment".

First the child "seeks to recapture [his mother] by the full exercise of his limited resources. He will often cry loudly, shake his cot, throw himself about...All his behavior suggests strong expectation that she will return."(16)

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Then, "During the phase of despair...his behaviour suggests increasing hopelessness. The active physical movements diminish or come to an end...He is withdrawn and inactive, makes no demands on people in the environment, and appears to be in a state of deep mourning."(17)

Last, in the phase of detachment", there is a striking absence of the behaviour characteristic of the strong attachment normal at this age...he may seem hardly to know [his mother]...he may remain remote and apathetic...He seems to have lost all interest in her"(18) So the child eventually removes the painful neg-comps by removing the source of the pain from his thought.

5) Various positive feelings arise when the person is hopeful about improving the situation--changing the neg-comp into a more positive comparison -- and is actively striving to do so.

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