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 18

cont.

Making It Happen

Is Values Therapy an easy and comfortable cure for depression? Usually it is not, just as all other anti-depression tactics require effort and stamina. At the beginning, Values Therapy requires considerable mental hard work and discipline, even with the help of a counselor, in constructing an honest and inclusive graded list of your desires in life. After you have decided which are your most fundamental values, you must remind yourself of those values when you start to make negative self- comparisons and get depressed. But it takes effort and dedication to keep reminding yourself of those values--just as it takes effort to remind another person of important matters when they are being forgotten.

So staying unrepressed with Values Therapy is not perfectly easy. But did you really expect otherwise? As the lady said, I never promised you a rose garden. You'll have to judge for yourself whether this is too high a price to pay for being free of depression.

The list of steps given above for Values Therapy may seem pedestrian (a modest play on words, for which I trust you will forgive me) because it is stated in simple, operational terms. You may also assume that this procedure is standard and well- known. In fact, Values Therapy as embodied in these operational steps is quite new. And I hope that you will consider the procedure seriously if other procedures have not managed to overcome your depression. I also hope that theoreticians and empirical workers in psychology will recognize the newness of this approach and will consider it with some gravity, even though it is not simply an extension of the approaches they are accustomed to.

Postscript: Values Treatment As Upside-Down Spectacles

Depressives see the world differently than do non- depressives. Where others see a glass as half-full, depressives see the glass as half-empty. Hence depressives need devices to turn many of their perceptions upside down. Values Therapy often can provide the impetus for the reversal of viewpoint.

A person's capacity to alter his or her perspective of the world by effort and practice is astonishing. An interesting example comes from a long-ago experiment in which subjects were given "upside down" eyeglasses that inverted everything seen; what normally is seen below appeared above, and vice versa. Within a period of weeks the subjects had grown so accustomed to the glasses that they responded quite normally to visual cues. Depressives need to put on psychological spectacles which turn their comparisons upside down and make them perceive the glass as half full rather than half empty, and invert a "failure" into a "challenge."

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Values Therapy radically alters one's life perspective. Humor, too, changes one's perspective, and a little humor about one's depression can help you. Not the black humor of "I wasn't cut out to be a human being," but rather amusement at how one twists reality to give oneself a ridiculously bad shake. For example, at 9:30 a.m. today, I've now been at my desk for 1-1/4 hours, working on notes for this book, a bit of stuff for class, some filing, etc. But then I notice I haven't written anything yet. I haven't done something both creative and solid, haven't created any pages yet. So I tell myself that I can't let myself have breakfast yet, because I don't deserve it, as if all the other things I have done have not been useful work. When I catch myself in this kind of willful rotten interpretation of reality, I'm amused, and it relaxes me.

Another example: As I was looking for the elevator on the sixth floor of an apartment house while I was depressed, I saw a sign on the wall that said, "Incinerator -- Trash and Garbage". I immediately said to myself, "Ah, that's the way I should go down." This amused me and reminded me how silly is my lack of self-esteem that led me to have such thoughts.

In the case above of the man whose wife had died, we saw an example of how Frankl's paradoxical intention turns the world upside down. Here is another example of his upside-down technique:

W. S., aged thirty-five, developed the phobia that he would die of a heart attack, particularly after intercourse, as well as a phobic fear of not being able to go to sleep. When Dr. Gerz asked the patient in his office to "try as hard as possible" to make his heart beat fast and die of a heart attack" right on the spot," he laughed and replied: "Doc, I'm trying hard, but I can't do it." Following my technique, Dr. Gerz instructed him "to go ahead and try to die from a heart attack" each time his anticipatory anxiety troubled him. When the patient began laughing about his neurotic symptoms, humor entered in and helped him to put distance between himself and his neurosis. He left the office relieved, with instructions to "die at least three times a day of a heart attack"; and instead of "trying hard to go to sleep," he should "try to remain awake." This patient was seen three days later -- symptom-free. He had succeeded in using paradoxical intention effectively.19 Ellis stresses the importance of humor in getting you to see how ridiculous are many of our "ought's" and "must's". He has written funny songs for the depressive to sing to help change your mood.

Still another example of how turning your picture of the world upside-down can help you: A good rule for depressives much of the time is the opposite of the Hillel-Jesus Golden Rule. The "Sunshine Rule for Depressives" is: "Do unto yourself as you would do unto others."

To illustrate the Sunshine Rule: Let's say that good and wise friends point out to you your better traits and successes, and encourage you even to the extent of giving you the benefit of the doubt when the facts are not clear. But enemies do the opposite. Depressives dwell on their own shortcomings, as does an enemy. The Sunshine Rule implies that one has a moral obligation to act as a friend to yourself, truly makes.

Summary

Values Treatment is an extraordinary new (though very old) cure for depression. When a person's negative self-comparisons - no matter what their original cause - are expressed as shortfalls between the person's circumstances and her most fundamental beliefs (values) about what a person should be and do, Values Treatment can build on other values to defeat the depression. The method is to find within yourself other fundamental beliefs and values that call for a person not to suffer but rather to live happily and joyfully, for the sake of God or for the sake of man - oneself, family, or others. If you believe in the super ordinate value of a belief which conflicts with being depressed, that belief can induce you to enjoy and cherish life rather than to be sad and depressed.

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