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 4

cont.

There are many possible reasons why depressives differ from other persons. For example, depressives may have experienced especially strong pressure from parents to set and achieve high goals, and in response have come to rigidly believe that those goals must be sought . They may have suffered traumatic loss of parents or others as children. They may have genetically-caused biological makeup's, such as a low energy level, that may easily make them feel helpless. And there are many other possible causes. But we need not further consider the matter because it is the current thinking and behavior patterns that must be changed.

Biology and Depression

Earlier, it was mentioned that biological factors--genetic origins, physical constitution, state of your health --may influence your propensity for depression. A word about them seems appropriate here.

Biological factors can apparently operate directly upon the emotions of sadness-happiness, and/or upon the comparison mechanism to make a comparison seem more negative or positive than it otherwise would be perceived. This is consistent with such observed facts as that:

1) Being sad often comes with being tired. Being tired also makes depressives judge that endeavors will fail, that they are helpless as well as worthless, and so on. This makes sense because when one is tired it is objectively true that one is less competent to control the circumstances of one's life than when one is fresh. And the tiredness also typically makes depressives project into the future that they will not be successful. Hence the bodily state of being tired affects the person's self- comparisons and hence her sadness-happiness state.

2) Postpartum depression follows a whole series of biological changes, and seems to have no psychological explanation.

3) Mononucleosis and infectious hepatitis tend to cause depression. (7)

4) Some geneticists have concluded that there is "strong evidence in favor of considering manic-depressive psychosis to be genetically influenced in good part, [but] we are unable to come to any conclusions regarding its mode of inheritance."(8) And for a while it was believed that the causal gene had been identified, but later reports have cast doubt on this conclusion (Washington Post, November 28, 1989, p. Health 7). And some researchers believe that there is evidence for a "biochemical scar" which remains from past depression and which continues to influence feelings in the present; a deficiency of the chemical norepinephrine is commonly implicated by the biochemists. (This need not contradict the observation mentioned earlier that survivors of catastrophes such as concentration-camp experience do not suffer unusual amounts of depression.

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There is clear biological evidence that depressed people have differences in body chemistry from non-depressed people.10 There also is a direct biological connection between negative self-comparisons and physically-induced pain. Psychological trauma such as a loss of a loved one induces some of the same bodily changes as does the pain from a migraine headache, say. When people refer to the death of a loved one as "painful", they are speaking about a biological reality and not just a metaphor. And it is reasonable that more ordinary "losses" -- of status, income, career, and of a mother's attention or smile in the case of a child -- have the same sorts of effects even if milder.

The Appendix to this chapter discusses the role of drugs in treating depression.

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