Good Mood: The New Psychology
of Overcoming Depression

Self-comparisons constitute the choke point for depressing thoughts. They are the final common path through which all depressing forces exert their influence. And if the person feels helpless to improve her situation, the sense of helplessness combines with the negative self-comparisons to cause sadness and depression rather than a state of mobilized activity or an angry mood; this description has been repeated many times earlier in this book because it is the core mechanism of depression. This short chapter briefly discusses the sense of helplessness, and how to fight it.1

Negative self-comparisons (neg-comps) by themselves do not necessarily make you sad. Instead, you may get angry, or you may mobilize yourself to change your state of affairs. But a helpless, hopeless attitude along with neg-comps leads to sadness and depression. This has even been shown in well-known rat experiments2. Rats which have experienced unavoidable electric shocks later behave with less fight, and more depression, with respect to electric shocks that they can avoid than do rats that did not previously experience unavoidable shocks. The rats which experienced unavoidable shocks also show chemical changes associated with depression similar to humans. It behooves us, then, to consider how one can mitigate the helpless feeling.

People as well as rats learn general attitudes about their capacity to act effectively, which then affect their outlook on specific situations. When I was an infant, my parents put me into a large box-like structure hung outside a second-floor window, well-checked by an architect friend for safety. In accord with the theory of the times, they taught me independence by refusing to accede to my cries when I sought attention and company. Throughout my life, I have had a predisposition not to ask others for help such as advice, and support within institutions, because I assumed that help would not be forthcoming. It is entirely possible that my attitude of not expecting help from people, stems from my experiences outside the window as a child, probably accompanied by a general attitude on the part of my parents of making me go it alone. On the other hand, I have always had the feeling that I could master my physical and mental circumstances with study, hard work, and patience so as to make my living situation comfortable and convenient, and my intellectual problems superable, and to make do with my own company. In such fashion are lifelong attitudes acquired with respect to capability and helplessness.

One obvious tactic is to realize that you are not helpless and you can change your actual state of affairs so that the comparison will be less negative. Sometimes this requires gradual re-learning through a graded series of tasks which show you that you can be successful, eventually leading to success in tasks that at the beginning seemed overwhelmingly difficult to you. This is the rationale of many behavioral programs that teach people to overcome their fears of going out in public, of heights, of various social situations, and so on.

Indeed, the rats mentioned above which first learned to be helpless when given inescapable shocks afterwards were taught by experimenters to learn that they could escape the later shocks, and they thereby showed diminished chemical changes associated with depression. The underlying assumption of "learned helplessness" is that if a depressive learns to feel more capable and less helpless, she will be less prone to sadness and depression, because her neg-comps will then be accompanied by purposeful activity to change them.

It is not always clear just how capable people ought to feel. Sometimes vacationers are told that they are capable of swimming across a body of water which they are not capable of swimming, and hence they drown. Sometimes students are told they are capable of mastering programs which are too much for them, and hence they fail painfully. People's situations are not always like the situations of the laboratory rats which have been taught to act as if they are helpless when in fact they are able to escape from the shocks they receive.

External conditions may dictate that the individual is indeed helpless to improve a particular neg-comp. A 55-year old tennis player cannot realistically hope to improve his speed afoot to again beat the younger partner who has just begun to beat him.

Exhaustion and ill health also restrict a person's possibilities for improving one's situation. It is thoroughly reasonable that lack of energy and sad feelings often keep company.

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