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Good Mood: The New Psychology
of Overcoming Depression

Appendix

Some Other Technical Issues That Self-Comparisons Analysis Illuminates

cont.

1.- An earlier section in this appendix discusses how the concept of negative self-comparisons pulls together into a single coherent theory not only depression but also paranoia, schizophrenia, normal responses to neg-comps, angry responses to negcomps, dread, anxiety, mania, phobias, apathy, and other troubling mental states. Recently, perhaps largely as a result of DSM-III (APA, 1980) and DSM-III-R (APA, 1987), the relationship of the various ailments -- anxiety to depression, schizophrenia to depression, and so on -- has generated considerable interest among students of the field. The ability of Self-Comparisons Analysis to relate all these mental states should make the theory more attractive to students of depression. And the distinction this theory makes between depression and anxiety fits with the recent findings of Steer et. al. (1986) that depression patients show more "sadness" on the Beck Depression Inventory than do anxiety patients, and that this characteristic and loss of libido are the only discriminating characteristics. The loss of libido fits with the part of Self- Comparisons Analysis that makes the presence of helplessness -- that is, felt incapacity -- the causal difference between the two ailments.

2.- No distinctions have been made here among endogenous, reactive, neurotic, psychotic, etc. types of depression. This jibes with recent writings in the field (e. g. DSM-III, and see the review by Klerman, 1988), and also with findings that these various supposed classes "are indistinguishable on the basis of cognitive symptomatology" (Eaves and Rush, 1984, cited by Beck,1987.) But the reason for the lack of distinction is more fundamentally theoretical: All varieties of depression share the basic element of Self-Comparisons Analysis -- the common pathway of negative self-comparisons in combination with a sense of helplessness. This element both distinguishes depression from other syndromes and constitutes the key and choke point at which to begin helping the patient change his or her thinking so as to overcome depression.

3.- The connection between cognitive therapy, with its emphasis on thought processes, and therapies of emotional release ranging from some aspects of psychoanalysis (including "transference") to "primal scream", merits some discussion. There is no doubt that some people have obtained relief from depression from these experiences, both in and out of psychological treatment. Alcoholics Anonymous is replete with reports of such experiences. William James, in Varieties of Religious Experience, makes a great deal of such "second births". In my own case, one quiet Saturday soon after I started to read and think hard about my depression, I decided not to go to the beach with my family and friends, and stayed alone in the quiet apartment. I felt an unusual lack of pressure to do anything, a freedom to do and be whatever I desired. After wandering around aimlessly for a bit, I lay on the bed face down and began to cry. I was racked with sobs for awhile, and then cried more quietly. And after I stopped I felt wonderful, full of peace in a way that I had not felt for a long time. And a series of thoughts began which led me to sense that my depression would soon be finished. Perhaps most important was the idea that I was not obligated to hold myself to the standards that I had attempted to meet in my work, and I was not required to compare myself with the elevated goals that had previously been before me. (The discovery of my value for my children not having a depressed father would come soon.)

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The nature of this sort of process -- which evokes such terms as "release" or "letting go" or "surrender to God" -- may hinge on the very sort of sense of "permission" that Ellis makes so much of. The person finds that she or he is free from the must's and ought's that had made the person feel enslaved. There is truly a "release" from this emotional bondage to a particular set of benchmark-state denominators that cause a constant Rotten Mood Ratio. So here, then, is a plausible connection between emotional release and cognitive therapy, though there undoubtedly are other connections as well.

4.- There is a long tradition in psychology -- of which Freud was perhaps the leading practitioner -- of using clinical psychological theories to explain non-clinical phenomena of particular interest to the writer. I, too, shall briefly indulge in this entertainment in next few sections.

It seems to me that there are related non-therapeutic phenomena that Self-Comparisons Analysis illuminates particularly well. One such is the apparently-increasing secular trend in depression, wherein increased suicide accompanies increased income5, but the of relationship over the business cycle where decreased suicide accompanies increased income.6 In the short run, people's denominators (their income) expectations do not change much, and therefore when lower income occurs they compare it unfavorably with their former income. But over the long run, expectations change along with the change in income, and as comparisons are rooted less in such unarbitrary physical matters as a full belly, and more in such arbitrary matters as social standards. No more than a sketch of the analysis can be given in this short space, but perhaps this paragraph will at least be suggestive.

5.- See Klerman et. al., 1985, for birth-cohort trends, and Klerman, 1986 for a survey of the evidence. Seligman (1988) offers a wide-ranging impressionistic discussion with which the analysis sketched here may be compared. data

6.- For evidence on this, see Barnes and Simon (1968 ).

7.- The apparently-unrelated phenomenon of special- interest-lobby doom saying rhetoric points up the generality of this conceptual scheme beyond individual therapy. Consider as an example the devices used by those who wish to prove that the United States must protect its oil industry. To that end they attempt to cause depressing thoughts with a gloomy assessment of the situation. They distort the actual facts in the numerator of the Mood Ratio by claiming that there is an increasing shortage of oil, though the key fact is that the availability of oil as measured by the key indicator of its price has been falling in the long run and also in the short run; they also point to declining production capacity in the U. S., but omit mention of increasing production capacity elsewhere in the world which can provide for U. S. consumption. They present a frightening denominator for comparison, a prospect of running out of gasoline and electricity, and the absence of an idyllic world in which people would no longer have to apply effort and resources to obtain energy supplies. They focus attention only on the dimension of oil, without mention of substitute possibilities such as coal, nuclear power, hydropower, and solar energy, or they pooh-pooh them. They also do not mention that in each successive decade energy is a relatively less important part of the economy by all economic measures. And they threaten us with the inevitability of the decline of the U. S. industry, making us feel helpless to improve our situation by developing other alternatives. The entire mechanism of neg-comps-cum-helplessness is exploited to produce depressing thoughts, which presents the palliative of government subsidies and protection for the U. S. oil industry as the only apparent alternative. This is a case study in propaganda technique. The entire world-view schema that underlies doom saying rhetoric (see Simon, 1981) is similar to the negative bias of depressives to which Beck (1987) also has applied the term "schema".

8.- A classic case of unsound thinking with respect to money and business concerns the phenomenon of sunk cost. The amount that a person pays for a good -- whether it be a house or a stock or a patent -- has no proper place in the decision about whether to sell it, or at which price it should be sold; "sunk costs are sunk" and should be disregarded. But many people are unable to disregard the sunk cost, especially when the sale might be below the purchase price because it would then apparently represent a "loss" -- the same word which has been so salient in the depression literature. The problem is the negative comparison between actual sale price and the benchmark price; the resulting sale would be painful and "depressing", and therefore often is not made even though foregoing the sale is money-losing and bad business. (This phenomenon is related to the discussion of prospect theory earlier.)

9.- Political scientists theorize that social disturbances occur, not in stable periods of bad times, but after a period of improvement and then cessation of improvement. The period of improvement raises the benchmark denominator of what people expect, and their actual state of affairs seems to fall short of that. This will evoke active efforts to win change if people feel potent, or anger if their efforts are thwarted. If they come to feel helpless, people lapse into depression and lack of activity, or finally into apathy.

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