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.

People we call "normal" find ways to deal with losses and the consequent neg-comps and pain in ways that keep them from prolonged sadness. Anger is a frequent response, and can be useful, partly because the anger-caused adrenaline produces a rush of good feeling. Perhaps any person will eventually be depressed if subjected to many very painful experiences, even if the person does not have a special propensity for depression; consider Job. And paraplegic accident victims judge themselves to be less happy than do normal uninjured people.(19) On the other hand, consider this exchange reported between Walter Mondale, who ran for president of the United States in 1984, and George McGovern, who ran in 1972: Mondale: " George, when does it stop hurting?" McGovern, "When it does, I'll let you know." But despite their painful experiences, neither McGovern nor Mondale seems to have fallen into prolonged depression because of the loss. And Beck asserts that survivors of painful experiences such as concentration camps are no more subject to later depression than are other persons.(20)

This book confines itself to depression, leaving these other topics for treatment elsewhere.

Let's close this chapter on an upbeat topic, love. Requited youthful romantic love fits nicely into this framework. A youth in love constantly has in mind two deliciously positive elements -- that he or she "possesses" the wonderful beloved (just the opposite of loss, which often figures in depression) and that messages from the beloved say that in the eyes of the beloved he or she is wonderful, the most desired person in the world. In the unromantic terms of the mood ratio this translates into numerators of the perceived actual self being very positive relative to a range of benchmark denominators that the youth compares him/herself to at that moment. And the love being returned -- indeed the greatest of successes -- makes the youth feel full of competence and power because the most desirable of all states -- having the love of the beloved -- is not only possible but is actually being realized. So there is a Rosy Ratio and just the opposite of helplessness and hopeless. No wonder it feels so good!

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And of course it makes sense that unrequited love feels so bad. The youth is then in the position of not having the most desirable state of affairs one can imagine, and believing her/himself incapable of bringing about that state of affairs. And when one is rejected by the lover, one loses that most desirable state of affairs which the lover formerly had. The comparison is between the actuality of being without the beloved's love and the former state of having it. No wonder it is so painful to believe that it really is over and nothing one can do can bring back the love.

Summary

The basis for understanding and dealing with depressing the negative comparison between your actual and hypothetical benchmark situations that produces a bad mood, together with the conditions that lead you to make such comparisons frequently and acutely, and combined with the helpless feeling that makes the bad mood into a sad rather than angry mood; this is the set of circumstances constituting the deep and continued sadness that we call depression.

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