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 10

cont.

Just as alcoholics who have stopped drinking are forever different from other people with respect to alcohol (though recently there has been some scientific question raised about this), depressives who pull out of deep depression often are different than other people. They must constantly reinforce the dikes and guard against the first incursions of depression in order to keep a trickle from becoming a flood. Consider John Bunyan and Leo Tolstoy. Bunyan wrote as follows: "I found myself in a miry bog...and was as there left by God and Christ, and the Spirit, and all good things...I was both a burthen and a terror to myself...weary of my life, and yet afraid to die."(8) Tolstoy's relevant description of his depression is in Chapter 3.

James wrote as follows about the lives of Bunyan and Tolstoy after their depressions:

Neither Bunyan nor Tolstoy could become what we have called healthy-minded. They had drunk too deeply of the cup of bitterness ever to forget its taste, and their redemption is into a universe two stories deep. Each of them realized a good which broke the effective edge of his sadness; yet the sadness was preserved as a minor ingredient in the heart of the faith by which it was overcome. The fact of interest for us is that as a matter of fact they could and did find something welling up in the inner reaches of their consciousness, by which such extreme sadness could be overcome. Tolstoy does well to talk of it as that by which men live; for that is exactly what it is, a stimulus, an excitement, a faith, a force that reinfuses the positive willingness to live, even in full presence of the evil perceptions that ere- while made life seem unbearable.(8)

Depressives less exceptional than Tolstoy and Bunyan share this condition:

You rarely ever completely win the battle against sustained psychological pain. When you feel unhappy because of some silly idea and you analyze and eradicate this idea, it rarely stays away forever, but often recurs from time to time. So you have to keep reanalyzing and subduing repeatedly. You may acquire the ridiculous notion, for instance, that you cannot live without some friend's approval and may keep making yourself immensely miserable because you believe this rot. Then, after much hard thinking, you may finally give up this notion and believe it quite possible for you to live satisfactorily without your friend's approbation. Eventually, however, you will probably discover that you, quite spontaneously, from time to time revive the groundless notion that your life has no value without the approval of this--or some other--friend. And once again you feel you'd better work at beating this self-defeating idea out of your skull.(9)

But this does not mean that you are doomed to a constant and unrelenting struggle. As you learn more about yourself and your depression, and as you build habits to keep negative self- comparisons at bay, it gets easier and easier.

advertisement

Let us hasten to add that you will usually find the task of depropagandizing yourself from your own self- defeating beliefs easier and easier as you persist. If you consistently seek out and dispute your mistaken philosophies of life, you will find that their influence weakens. Eventually, some of them almost entirely lose their power to harass you. Almost.(10)

Furthermore, one often develops a commitment to remaining free of depression, just as a person who has stopped smoking has an investment in keeping a "clean record" and sustaining his or her success. One then feels a justifiable pride that helps keep you on the rails and away from sustained depression.

One Stroke For All?

Self-comparisons Analysis makes clear that many sorts of influences, perhaps in combination with each other, can produce persistent sadness. From this it follows that many sorts of interventions may be of help to a depression sufferer. That is, different causes--and there are many different causes, as most psychiatrists have finally concluded, call for different therapeutic interventions. Furthermore, there may be several sorts of intervention that can help any particular depression. Yet all these interventions may be traced to the "common pathway" of negative self-comparisons.

In short, different strokes for different folks. In contrast, however, each of the various schools of psychological therapy--psychoanalytic, behavioral, religious, and so on--does its own thing no matter what the cause of the person's depression, on the assumption that all depressions are caused in the same way. Furthermore, each school of thought insists that its way is the only true therapy.

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

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.