CONQUERING
DEPRESSION, ENJOYING LIFE
Julian
L. Simon
The most
convincing proof that
sadness is caused by the
unfavorable comparison of
actual and counterfactual
situations is your own
introspections. Check and
you will observe negative
self-comparisons prominent
in your thoughts when you
are sad--whether the
sadness is part of a
general depression or not.
And there is now a
good-sized body of
technical studies showing
that what are commonly
called "negative
thoughts" accompany
depression and are
unusually common among
people who have a
propensity for depression.
Only this
analysis makes sense of
such exceptional situations
as the person who is poor
in the world's goods but
nevertheless is happy, and
the person who "has
everything" but is
miserable; not only their
actual situations affect
their feelings, but also
the benchmark comparisons
they set up for themselves.
The sense
of loss--which often
is associated with the
onset of depression--also
is a negative comparison, a
comparison between the way
things were and the
way they are now. A
person who never had a
fortune does not experience
the loss of a fortune in a
stock market crash, and
does not suffer grief there
from.
Before we
discuss how you can
manipulate the Mood Ratio
in order to remove
depression, let us compare
this view of depression
with the conventional
psychological views of
depression.
Freud and
his followers--who until
the past few decades
dominated psychological
thinking about depression
in the twentieth century,
have viewed depression
simply as a result of loss.
"Melancholy is in some
way related to an
unconscious loss of a love
object, in contra
distinction to mourning, in
which there is nothing
unconscious about the
loss.... In grief the world
becomes poor and empty; in
melancholia it is the ego
itself that becomes poor
and empty" (l9l7-l925,
p. l55). Freud arrived at
this idea because he
observed great similarity
between the depression of
people grieving after a
death, and other
depressives. But the idea
of loss by itself
is not useful as the
central concept in
understanding depression.
Unless one employs a
tortured logic, the notion
of loss does not fit the
psychological states of
many depressives. For
example, being convinced
that one is of low moral
character can feed one's
depression, but it is not a
loss in any meaningful
sense; the person probably
does not think of
him/herself as ever having
had the high level of
morality that is the
benchmark for the negative
self-comparison. A Freudian
may find a way to define
this comparison as a loss,
but such reasoning only
confuses the issue.
The
psychoanalysts then joined
the Freudian notion of loss
to the observed fact that
people whose parents die,
desert them, or cut them
off emotionally in
childhood, have a higher
likelihood of adult
depression than do other
people. This observation
was then combined with a
medical approach to
depression as an ailment
that should be treated by
dealing with the root cause
of the childhood loss. This
view of depression and its
cure are diagrammed in
Figure l. In this scheme,
both the sadness and the
negative self- comparisons
are seen as symptoms of the
underlying causes.
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