Good Mood: The New Psychology
of Overcoming Depression

The depressive differs from the normal person in having a propensity for prolonged sadness; this is the stripped-down minimum definition of a depressive. This propensity, caused by some mental baggage or biochemical scar carried over from the past, interacts with contemporary events to maintain a state of negative self-comparison.

Much of this Part II is devoted to describing this special mental baggage of the depressive. In preview, here are several important cases:

1) The depressive may, because of her intellectual or emotional training in childhood, misinterpret actual current conditions in a negative direction so that the comparison between actual and hypothetical is perennially negative, or so that after a bit of bad fortune the return to a balanced or positive comparison is much slower than for a person who is not a depressive.

2) The depressive may have a view of the world, herself, and her obligations such that her actual conditions will necessarily always be below the hypothetical. An example is a person whose talents are not extraordinary but who was brought up to believe that her talents are such that she ought to win a Nobel prize. Hence, all her life she will feel a failure, her actual state below the hypothetical, and she will therefore be depressed.

3) The depressive may have a mental quirk which forces all comparisons to be seen as negative even if his actual conditions compare well with his counterfactual condition. For example, he may believe that all people are basically sinful, as Bertrand Russell was afflicted in his youth. Or the perennial negative self-comparison may be caused by biochemical factors to be discussed shortly.

4) The depressive may feel more acute pain from a given negative self-comparison than does the normal person. For example, the depressive might have memories of severe punishment in childhood each time his performance fell below the parental norm. Those memories of the pain from childhood punishment may intensify the pain of negative self-comparisons later on.

5) Still another difference between depressives and non- depressives is that depressives-- almost invariably while they are depressed, and in many cases also when they are not depressed--have a conviction of personal worthlessness and incompetence and lack of self esteem. This sense of worthlessness is general and persistent in depression, compared to the specific and transient sense of worthlessness everyone experiences from time to time. The person who is not depressed says, "I did badly on the job this month." The depressed person says, "I always do badly on jobs," and he thinks that he will continue to do badly in the future. The depressed person's "I'm no good" judgment seems permanent and refers to all of him, whereas the "I did badly" of the nondepressed person is temporary and refers to one part of him alone. This is an example of over generalizing, which is typical of many depressives and a source of much pain and sadness.

Perhaps depressives tend to over generalize as a general habit, and to be more absolutistic in their judgments than do normal people in most of their thinking. Or perhaps depressives confine these damaging habits of thought to self-evaluative areas of their life, which cause depression. Whichever is the case, these habitual modes of inflexible thinking can cause prolonged sadness and depression.3

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