Appendix (4): Good Mood: The New Psychology of Overcoming Depression

Good Mood

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An Integrated Cognitive Theory of Depression

Lincoln Pashute

cont.

Footnotes

1 The American Psychiatric Association's publication Depression and Its Treatment by John H. Greist and James W. Jefferson statement is similar and may be taken as canonical: "Depressed thinking often takes the form of negative thoughts about one's self, the present and the future" (1984, p. 2, italics in original). "Negative thinking" is also where the concept with which cognitive therapy of depression began, in the work of Beck and Ellis.

2 If you think you have failed an examination, even though you will later learn you passed it, then your perceived actual state is that you have failed the test. Of course there are many facets of your actual life that you can choose to focus upon, and the choice is very important. The accuracy of your assessment is important, too. But the actual state of your life usually is not the controlling element in depression. How you perceive yourself is not completely dictated by the actual state of affairs. Rather, you have considerable discretion as to how to perceive and assess the state of your life.

3 This view, though phrased as learning theory, is consistent with the psychoanalytic view: "At the bottom of the melancholiac's profound dread of impoverishment, there is really the dread of starvation...drinking at the mother's breast remains the radiant image of unremitting, forgiving love: (Rado in Gaylin, 1968, p. 80).

4 Please notice that this statement in no way denies that biological factors may be implicated in a depression. But biological factors, to the extent that they are operative, are underlying predisposing factors of the same order as a person's psychological history, rather than contemporary triggering causes.

5 Gaylin (1979) provides rich and thought-provoking descriptions of the feelings connected with these and other states of mind. But he does not distinguish between pain and the other states he calls "feelings," which I find confusing (see e.g. p. 7). Gaylin mentions in passing that he has found very little in print about feelings, which he classifies as an "aspect of emotions" (p. 10).

6 As Beck et. al. (1987) put it, based on patient responses to a study of "automatic thoughts" using a questioner, "anxiety cognitions...embody a greater degree of uncertainty and an orientation toward the future, whereas depressive cognitions are either oriented toward the past or reflect a more absolute negative attitude toward the future."

Freud asserted that "when the mother-figure is believed to be temporarily absent the response is one of anxiety, when she appears to be permanently absent it is one of pain and mourning." Bowlby in Gaylin, The Meaning of Despair (New York: Science House, 1968) p. 271.

7 In some later work, e. g. Beck et. al. (1979, p. 35) widen the concept to "patient's misinterpretations, self-defeating behavior, and dysfunctional attitudes". But the latter new elements border on the tautologous, being approximately equal to "thoughts that cause depression", and hence contain no guidance to their nature and treatment.

8 Burns nicely summarizes Beck's approach as follows: "The first principle of cognitive therapy is that all your moods are created by your 'cognitions'" (1980, p. 11). Self-comparisons Analysis makes this proposition more specific: Moods are caused by a particular type of cognition --self-comparisons -- in conjunction with such general attitudes as (for example, in the case of depression) feeling helpless.

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Burns says the "The second principle is that when you are feeling depressed, your thoughts are dominated by a pervasive negativity". (p. 12). Self-Comparisons Analysis also makes this proposition more specific: it replaces "negativity" with negative self-comparisons, in conjunction with feeling helpless.

According to Burns, "The third principle is ...that the negative thoughts ...nearly always contain gross distortions" (p. 12, itals. in original). Below I argue at some length that depressed thinking is not always best characterized as distorted.

Dear xxx
The name of the author on the enclosed paper is a pseudonym for a writer who is well-known in another field but does not ordinarily work in the field of cognitive therapy. The author asked me to send a copy to you (and to some others in the field) in hopes that you will give him/her some criticism on it. He/she feels that it would be fairer to the paper and to him/herself that you read it without knowing the author's identity. Your comments would be particularly valuable because of the author writes from outside your field.

In advance, thank you for your time and thought to an unknown colleague.

Sincerely,

Jim Caney?

Ken Colby?

APPENDIX A

(see p. 16 of paper)

Indeed, a solid body of research in recent years suggests that depressives are more accurate in their assessments of the facts concerning their lives than are non-depressives, who tend to have an optimistic bias. This raises interesting philosophical questions about the virtue of such propositions as "Know thyself", and "The unexamined life is not worth living", but we need not pursue them here.

2.1See Alloy and Abramson (1988) for a review of the data. If you make no self-comparisons, you will feel no sadness; that's the point of this chapter in a nutshell. A recent body of research0.1 confirms that this is so. There is much evidence that increased attention to yourself, in contrast to increased attention to the people, objects, and events around you, is generally associated with more signs of depressed feeling.

0.1This body of research is reviewed by Musson and Alloy (1988). Wicklund and Duval (1971, cited by Musson and Alloy) first directed attention to this idea.

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