Good Mood: The New Psychology
of Overcoming Depression

Ultimately we are interested in the mechanism of depression so that we can manipulate it to treat depression. Let's say that you have a Life Report which is predominantly negative, and it causes you to be sad and depressed. As noted in many places in this book, there are several ways to get rid of your sadness at any given moment. These include putting the Life Report out of your mind by pushing it out; changing some of the negative categories from important to unimportant; changing the standards by which you grade yourself on particularly important negative matters; learning how to interpret the external evidence more accurately, if you now do not interpret the evidence well; and involving yourself in work or creative activity that pulls your mind away from the Life Report.

The advantages and disadvantages of these and other methods of preventing depression depend upon your own psychology and your life situation. The pros and cons of each are discussed later in this book.

This chapter discusses why a particular person is more predisposed to depression than are other people who are closer to "normal".

The main elements that influence whether a person is sad or happy at a given moment, and whether one does or does not descend into the prolonged gloom of depression are as follows: 1) Experiences in childhood, both the general pattern of childhood as well as traumatic experiences, if any. 2) The person's adult history: the recent experiences have the greatest weight. 3) The actual conditions of the individual's present life-- relationships with people as well as such objective factors as health, job, finances, and so on. 4) The person's habitual mental states, plus her view of the world and herself. This includes her goals, hopes, values, demands upon herself, and ideas about herself, including whether she is effective or ineffective and important or unimportant. 5) Physical influences such as whether she is tired or rested, and anti- depression drugs she is taking, if any. 6) The machinery of thought which processes the material coming in from the other elements and produces an evaluation of how the person stands with respect to the hypothetical situation taken for comparison. (7) A sense of helplessness.

The depressive differs from the normal person in having a propensity for prolonged sadness; this is the stripped-down minimum definition of a depressive.

There are many possible reasons why depressives differ from other persons. For example, depressives may have experienced especially strong pressure from parents to set and achieve high goals, and in response have come to rigidly believe that those goals must be sought . They may have suffered traumatic loss of parents or others as children. They may have genetically-caused biological makeup's, such as a low energy level, that may easily make them feel helpless. And there are many other possible causes. But we need not further consider the matter because it is the current thinking and behavior patterns that must be changed.

Why not simply prescribe anti-depression drugs--several of which are in the armamentarium of physicians--for all cases of depression? The fact that bodily states may be related to depression suggests the use of drugs to artificially remove neurochemical imbalances, that is, to alter bodily states in such manner as to relieve depression. Indeed, Kline suggested that "physical repair through drug therapy is probably useful even in cases in which the original problem was primarily psychological.9"

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