Good Mood: The New Psychology
of Overcoming Depression

Do you really want to shake off your depression? Don't answer too fast, and don't be too sure. It is quite common that people get enough benefits from their depressions so that they prefer remaining depressed--despite all its unpleasantness--to being undepressed. So they stay depressed.

At first this assertion seems nonsensical. Doesn't everyone want to be happy rather than sad? But the word "want" is a tricky one, because a person can have more than one "want" at a given moment. By analogy, consider that you may "want" a piece of chocolate, but you may also "want" not to ingest additional calories or get fat. The resultant of these two forces may be that you do not eat the cake even though you "want" it, or you may eat it even though you want not to get fat.

There are two kinds of conflicting wants that may be involved in depression: other wants which conflict with being free of depress, and the wish to stay depressed for its own sake. Here are a few examples of "wants" that may keep you depressed:1

1) You may know that overwork causes you to be depressed, but you may want the fruits of the work sufficiently badly so that you overwork anyway. This is little different than the situation of the person who risks heart attack by working too hard.

2) You may have the "magical" belief that if you punish yourself for your misdeeds by being sad, an authority (which may be God) will take note of your self-punishment and therefore refrain from punishing you further. We see this in children who, following misbehavior, put on a sad and apologetic face and thereby effectively avoid punishment. This connection may continue to exist within the adult's mind, even though it no longer works. A person who violates a legal or moral code may punish himself with sadness in the hope that the law or his peers or God will thereby be foreclosed from punishing him in an even worse manner. Hence he chooses to remain depressed.

3) "Experienced" depressives -- that is, people who suffer depression from time to time -- sometimes use depression as an excuse not to meet demands and do unpleasant chores.

4) An important "benefit" of depression is that you can feel sorry for yourself because you are so miserable. Self-pity and depression are almost inseparable, wrapped up with each other like climbing vines. Some writers have even believed that self- pity is the origin of depression.

At the root of the adult depression of a child whose parents die may lie this mechanism involving self-pity: At the time of the death, other members of the family express their sorrow and pity for the child, together with their love for the child. This is relatively pleasant for the bereaved child, and it is the best substitute for the parent's love. It would be logical for a child to extend the period of seeming depressed in order to continue eliciting this expressed pity and love by others. And this pattern of depression to elicit pity and love may continue through the person's life--perhaps most strongly for a person who does not get enough of this pity and sorrow to surfeit her at the time of bereavement.

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