Appendix (4): Good Mood: The New Psychology of Overcoming Depression

Good Mood

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Good Mood:
The New Psychology
of Overcoming Depression

Chapter 3

cont.

The sense of loss--which is often associated with the onset of depression--is a negative comparison between the way things were and the way they are now. The American poet John Greenleaf Whittier (in Maud Muller) caught the nature of loss as a comparison in these lines: "For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: It might have been!" Whittier makes it clear that sadness arises not just because of what actually happened, but also because of the counterfactual benchmark which "might have been."

Notice how, when we suffer from what we call "regret," we harp on the counterfactual benchmark--how an inch more to the side would have won the game which would have put the team into the playoffs which would have led to a championship, how but for one horse's nail the war was lost, how--if not for the slaughter by the Germans in World War II, or the Turks in World War I--the Jews and Armenians would be so much more numerous and their cultures would be strengthened, and so on.

The basis for understanding and dealing with depression, then, is the negative comparison between your actual and hypothetical benchmark situations that produces a bad mood, together with the conditions that lead you to make such comparisons frequently and acutely, and combined with the helpless feeling that makes the bad mood into a sad rather than angry mood; this is the set of circumstances constituting the deep and continued sadness that we call depression.

Why Do Negative Self-Comparisons Cause A Bad Mood?

But why do negative self-comparisons and a Rotten Ratio produce a bad mood?

There is a biological connection between negative self- comparisons and physically-induced pain. Psychological trauma such as a loss of a loved one induces some of the same bodily changes as does the pain from a migraine headache, say. When people refer to the death of a loved one as "painful", they are speaking about a biological reality and not just a metaphor. It is reasonable that more ordinary "losses" -- of status, income, career, and of a mother's attention or smile in the case of a child -- have the same sorts of effects, even if milder. And children learn that they lose love when they are bad, unsuccessful, and clumsy, as compared to when they are good, successful, and graceful. Hence negative self-comparisons indicating that one is "bad" in some way are likely to be coupled to the biological connections to loss and pain. It also makes sense that the human's need for love is connected to the infant's need for food and being nursed and held by its mother, the loss of which must be felt in the body.(4)

Indeed, research cited later shows a statistical link between the death of a parent and the propensity to be depressed, in both animals and humans. And much careful laboratory work shows that separation of adults and their young produces the signs of depression in dogs and monkeys(5). Hence lack of love hurts and makes one sad, just as lack of food makes one hungry.

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