Good Mood: The New Psychology
of Overcoming Depression

RELATIONSHIP OF SELF-COMPARISONS ANALYSIS 
TO OTHER THEORY

Albert Ellis's Rational-Emotive Therapy

Ellis operates primarily upon the benchmark state, urging that the depressive not consider goals and "ought" states as strongly binding "must"s. He teaches people not to "musturbate" - - that is, to free oneself of unnecessary must's and ought's. Again this is fine advice which helps a depressive adjust his/her benchmark state, and the person's relationship to it, in such fashion that one makes fewer and less-painful negative self- comparisons. Coming to recognize that I did not have to accept the particular goals and standards that I had previously accepted was the first of the key events in my own victory over depression. But as with Beck's (and below, Seligman's) therapeutic advice, Ellis's focuses on only one aspect of the depression structure. As a system, therefore, his doctrine therefore restricts the options available to the therapist and patient, omitting some other avenues which may be just what a particular person needs.

Interpersonal Therapy

Klerman, Weissman, et. al. focus on the neg-comps that flow from interactions between the depressive and others as a result of conflict and criticism. There can be no doubt that bad relationships with other people damage a person's actual inter- personal situation and and exacerbate other difficulties in the person's life. And it therefore is undeniable that teaching a person better ways of relating to others will improve a person's real situation and therefore the person's state of mind. But the fact that people living alone often suffer depression makes clear that not all depression flows from inter-personal relationships, and therefore to focus only on inter-personal relationships to the exclusion of other cognitive and behavioral elements is too limited.

Learned Helplessness

Seligman focuses on ways to reduce the helplessness that almost all depression sufferers report, an element which combines with neg-comps to produce sadness. And he expresses what other writers say less explicitly about their own core ideas, that the theoretical element he concentrates on is the main issue in depression. Talking about the many kinds of depression classified by another writer, he says: "I will suggest that, at the core, there is something unitary that all these depressions share" (p. 78).

I agree that the sense of helplessness is centrally involved in all depressions. But Seligman leaves the impression that helplessness is the only invariable element, which I believe is not the case; negative self-comparisons are at least as omni- present. His therapeutic focus on reducing the sense of helplessness points him away from adaptations of other parts of the system. (This may follow from his experimental work with animals, which do not have the capacity to make such adjustments in perceptions, judgments, goals, values, and so on, which are central to human depression and which people can and do alter. That is, people disturb themselves, as Ellis puts it, whereas animals do not.)

Self-comparisons Analysis and the procedure it implies include learning not to feel helpless. But this approach focuses on the helpless attitude in conjunction with the neg-comps that are the direct cause of the sadness of depression, rather than only on the helpless attitude, as Seligman does. Again, Self- comparisons Analysis reconciles and integrates another important element of depression into an over-arching theory.

Other Approaches

Viktor Frankl's Logotherapy offers two modes of help. One mode is a philosophical attempt to help a person find meaning in his or her life which will give the person a reason to live, and to live with the pain of sadness and depression; this has much in common with Values Treatment as discussed in Chapter 18, and is discussed there. Another mode is the tactic Frankl calls "paradoxical intention". The therapist offers the patient a radically different perspective on the patient's situation, either the numerator or the denominator of the Mood Ratio, using absurdity and humor; this is discussed in Chapter 10. Frankl has successfully trained others in the use of his techniques, and he reviews studies showing success. Both patients and therapists can surely find his tools useful in a variety of thought contexts.

Substitutions and Combinations of Methods

Even a simple procedure like that of Coue' could achieve good results with some sufferers by operating on just one aspect of the process in an uncomplicated fashion. Such a single view of a depressive's thinking is just the opposite of the complex view of the process in my explanatory diagram in Appendix A, which looks like spaghetti. But complexity offers opportunities for many kinds of interventions and adjustments that are obscured from the sufferer and from the therapist by a focus on a single procedure.

Self-comparisons Analysis makes clear that many sorts of influences, perhaps in combination with each other, can produce persistent sadness. From this it follows that many sorts of interventions may be of help to a depression sufferer. That is, different causes--and there are many different causes--call for different therapeutic interventions. Furthermore, there may be several sorts of intervention that can help any particular depression.

In short, different strokes for different folks. In contrast, however, each of the various schools of psychological therapy--psychoanalytic, behavioral, religious, and so on--does its own thing no matter what the cause of the person's depression, on the implicit assumption that all depressions are caused in the same way. Furthermore, each school of thought insists that its way is the only true therapy despite the wise remark of Greist and Jefferson quoted earlier that because "depression is almost certainly caused by different factors, there is no single best treatment for depression" (1984, p. 72). As a practical matter, the depression sufferer faces a baffling disarray of treatments, and the choice is too often made simply on the basis of chance.

Self-comparisons Analysis points a depression sufferer toward the most promising tactic to banish the particular person's depression. It focuses first on understanding why a person makes negative self-comparisons. Then it develops ways of preventing the neg-comps, rather than focusing on merely understanding and reliving the past, or on simply changing contemporary habits. With this understanding one can choose how best to fight the depression and achieve happiness.

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