Good Mood: The New Psychology
of Overcoming Depression

APPENDIX

BACKGROUND INFORMATION FOR RESEARCHERS AND PRACTITIONERS

The book uses "you" language to address the depression sufferer. And some general readers will find interesting the information in the appendices. But the book also is aimed at psychotherapeutic professionals, both researchers and practitioners, with an additional message: the contains a new theoretical understanding of depression, which implies new ways of confronting depression.

The fundamental idea of modern psychological therapy for depression is that individuals can change their thinking processes in ways that will eliminate the patterns which cause the depression. The layperson may consider this to be plain common sense. But when seen in light of the older Freudian view, this common-sense foundation is revolutionary. And though the fundamental assumption is "only" common sense, the scientific structure constructed upon it is not at all obvious. Building upon this foundation, various researchers have focused on different aspects of the thinking processes which are commonly faulty among depressives. And they have shown how altering the defective thinking can improve people's moods.

This book develops a broader framework that encompasses all the major insights of earlier writers. Within that framework, it focuses on the key cognitive channel -- self-comparisons -- through which all the other influences flow. Philosophers have understood for centuries that the comparisons one makes affect one's feelings. But this element has not previously been explored or integrated into scientific understanding of the thinking of depressives, or exploited as the central pressure-point for therapy. Instead, the concept "negative thoughts" has been used.

Appendix B continues the theoretical discussion with an analysis of how this approach to depression fits with, and broadly encompasses, the other modern cognitive psychological approaches to depression. The remainder of this Appendix A adds some theoretical underpinning to discussions in early chapters. It also briefly discusses how this approach, along with cognitive therapy in general, has been moving toward the use of concepts found in philosophy and other social sciences, some by borrowing but even more by independent invention. In this way, cognitive therapy moves toward what may eventually be the the first application of integrated social science.

In brief, Self-Comparisons Analysis does the following: 

1. It presents a theoretical framework which identifies and focuses on the common pathway through which all depression-causing lines of thought must pass. This framework combines and integrates other valid approaches, subsuming all of them as valuable but partial. All of the many variations of depressions that modern psychiatry now recognizes as heterogenous but related forms of the same illness can be subsumed under the theory except those that have a purely biological origin, if there are such. 
2. It sharpens each of the other viewpoints by converting, the rather vague notion of "negative thinking"1 to a precise formulation of a self-comparison and a negative Mood Ratio with two specific parts, an assumed actual state of affairs and a hypothetical benchmark state of affairs. This idea opens up a wide variety of novel interventions. 
3. It offers a new line of attack upon stubborn depressions, called here Values Treatment, which leads the patient to make a committed choice to give up depression in order to attain more important deeply-held values.

The American Psychiatric Association's publication Depression and Its Treatment by John H. Greist and James W. Jefferson (Washington: Am. Psychiatric Press, 1984) may be taken as canonical: "Depressed thinking often takes the form of negative thoughts about one's self, the present and the future"

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