Good Mood: The New Psychology
of Overcoming Depression

Upon awakening every single morning for all those years my first thought was, "All those hours! How am I going to get through them?" That was the worst moment of the day, before I could get my fear and sadness under conscious control. The best moments of the day were crawling into bed finally to go to sleep, at night or for a nap in the late afternoon.

You may doubt that I was really depressed for so long or that my depression was deep. How could anyone be continually depressed for thirteen years? In fact, there were hours when I was not depressed. Those were the hours when I was deep enough in my work and in creative thinking that I forgot about my depression. These hours happened almost every morning, once I had gotten myself started on the day, provided that the work I was doing was reasonably creative rather than just such routine work as editing or proofreading--and providing, also, that I was not overly pessimistic about the probable reception of that particular piece of work. This meant that for probably half the days during the year I had a couple of hours in the morning, and perhaps an hour late in the evening after I had a drink, when I was not consciously sad.

Only work helped. For a long time my wife thought that she could distract me with movies and other entertainment, but it never worked. In the midst of the movie I'd be thinking how worthless a person I am, and about the failures of all my efforts. But in the midst of work--and especially when I would have a beautiful hard problem to think through, or a new idea would come to me -- my depression would ease. Thank goodness for the work.

You may wonder, as I did: If the sadness and self-loathing hurt so much, why I didn't resort to liquor and tranquilizers (the new drugs were not then available) to cut the pain? I didn't do so, even during the worst half-year or year at the beginning, for two reasons: First, I felt that I had no "right" to use artificial gimmicks to escape from the pain because I felt it was my own fault. Second, I was afraid that tranquilizers or other drugs would interfere with the one part of me that I continued to respect, my ability to have ideas and think clearly. Without explicitly recognizing it, I acted as if the only possible avenue of escape for me, in the short run and the long run, was to be able to think well enough to involve myself in some work for a while every day, and maybe eventually to do enough useful work to bring about self-respect. Booze or pills could ruin that avenue of hope, I thought.

All those years I concealed my depression so that no one except my wife knew about it. I was afraid to seem vulnerable. And I saw no benefits in revealing my depression. When occasionally I hinted about it to my friends, they did not seem to respond, perhaps because I did not make clear how badly off I really was.

In December, l974, I told the family physician that I had reduced my possibilities of happiness to "two hopes and a flower." One of the hopes was a book which I hoped would make an important contribution to people's thinking and perhaps to some government policies. I worried that the book was not written in a sufficiently attractive manner to make any impact, but it was one of my hopes anyway. The second of my hopes was that sometime in the future I'd write a book about how to think, how to use one's head, how to use one's mental resources, in such a way as to make the best use of them. I hoped that that book would put together a lot of what I've done and what I know into a new and useful form. (As of 1990, I have finished a first draft of that book, having worked on it last year and this year.)

The flower was a flower that I often looked at while I was meditating. In that meditation I could let everything go and feel that there is absolutely no "ought" of obligation upon me-- no "ought" to continue meditating, no "ought" to stop meditating, no "ought" to think about this or to think about that, no "ought" to telephone or not to telephone, to work or not to work. The flower was for that moment an enormous relief from "ought," the flower that demanded nothing yet offered great beauty in quiet and peace.

About l971, give or take a year, I decided that I wanted to be happy. I had figured out that one cause of my depression was my self-punishment for what I felt were my bad deeds, in the superstitious belief that if I punished myself this might ward off other people's punishment. And I then concluded that I no longer felt the need to be unhappy as a way of punishing myself. So, the first thing that happened in this sequence of events was that I decided explicitly that I wanted to be happy.

Starting perhaps l972, I tried a variety of devices to break through my depression and give me happiness. I tried Zen-type concentration on the moment to prevent my thoughts from slipping to anxious memories of the past or anxious fears about the future. I tried think-happy exercises. I tried breathing exercises, separately and also together with concentration exercises. I started a list of "good things that I can say about myself" in those moments when I felt low and worthless and devoid of self-esteem, to pep myself up. (Unfortunately, I only managed to get two things down on the list: a) My children love me. b) All students who have done theses with me respect me, and many continue our relationship. Not a very long list, and I never managed to use it successfully. None of these schemes helped for more than half a day or a day.)

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