CONQUERING DEPRESSION, ENJOYING LIFE

Julian L. Simon

Figure 1

The medical view of depression has at least two crucial drawbacks: (l) the therapy based upon it does not have a good record of success in curing depression; and (2) even where it is successful, such therapy is enormously costly in time and money.

A very different view of depression--whose roots may be found in the emphasis on self-esteem by William James, who now is finally being recognized as the greatest of all psychologists, and a better student of human nature than Freud--is in the spirit of what is commonly called "cognitive psychotherapy". Cognitive psychotherapy, which by now is perhaps the dominant position in contemporary psychology, views the person's present thinking as in the middle of the chain of causality running from the person's childhood and present events at the input end to the sadness at the output end, as seen in Figure 2. The "irrational thinking" which both Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck emphasize as the cause of depression is consistent with this point of view.

Figure 2

At the foundation of the cognitive point of view is the age-old commonsense idea that each of us has at least some power to decide what we will spend our moments thinking about, and which other persons, events and ideas we will attend to. This is in sharp contrast with the psychoanalytic view, which considers our thoughts to be mainly determined by our personal history and present external events. Of course the difference between these two points of view is a matter of emphasis, but the emphasis is all- important in deciding how to tackle a case of depression.

The cognitive view holds that we can use their minds to deal with our inner problems just as we deal with our outer problems. For example, we assume that an ordinary person can say to himself or herself, "Now I'm going to stop watching television and start doing my income-tax return," and then the person can carry out that decision. Similar, the cognitive view is that you can say to yourself "Every time a customer makes me feel that I haven't done a good job, which usually puts me into a blue funk, I will remind myself how many of my customers appreciate me". Another example: In the cognitive approach, an excellent 40-year-old tennis player learns the habit of remembering, after a bad day on the courts, that he can beat 99% of the 20-year-old players, and also remembering how many people are not even physically fit to play tennis at all at age 40.

Self-Comparisons Analysis, as I call this point of view, is consistent with the cognitive view of human psychology that one can banish depression by changing the depressive's present mode of thinking. But the Mood Ratio is more precise in its identification of the depression mechanism than simply referring to "irrational thinking" or "negative thoughts" or "poor cognition". This formulation offers several avenues for fighting depression--by altering the numerator, or the denominator, or the dimension of evaluation, or the frequency of any evaluations, rather than focusing only on the numerator (and perhaps on the denominator), as do cognitive therapists. Furthermore, Self-Comparisons Analysis opens up a wholly new way of combating depressions that resist other approaches--Values Therapy.

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