Good Mood: The New Psychology
of Overcoming Depression

There are many possible interacting elements in the development of a propensity to make neg-comps (negative self- comparisons), conceivably including a genetic element, and the elements differ from person to person. Understanding this mechanism is a necessary forerunner to designing the appropriate cure as discussed in Part III. The neg-comp is the last link in the causal chain leading to sadness and depression, the "common pathway", in medical parlance. If we can remove or alter this link, we can relieve depression.

To repeat, the central element in your sadness and depression, and the key to your cure, is as follows: You feel sad when a) you compare your actual situation with some "benchmark" hypothetical situation, and the comparison appears negative; and b) you think you are helpless to do anything about it. This analysis may seem obvious to you after you reflect on it, and many great philosophers have touched on it. But this key idea has had little place in the psychological literature on depression, though the negative self-comparison is the key to understanding and treating depression.

The element of "negative thoughts" has been mentioned by just about every writer on depression through the ages, as has been the more specific set of negative thoughts that make up low self-evaluation. And controlled laboratory experiments have recently shown that depressed people remember fewer instances of being rewarded for successful performance than do non-depressed subjects, and remember more instances of being punished for unsuccessful performance. Depressed subjects also reward themselves less frequently when told to decide which responses were successful and which were not1.

Negative thoughts have not, however, been previously discussed in a systematic fashion as comprising comparison, as every evaluation is by nature a comparison. Nor has the interaction between the neg-comps and the sense of helplessness, which converts neg-comps into sadness and depression, been described elsewhere as it is here. It is the conceptualization of the negative thoughts as negative self-comparisons which opens up the wide variety of theoretical and curative approaches discussed here.

After you grasp this idea, you see its traces in many places. For example, notice the casual mention of self- comparisons in these remarks of Beck that "the repeated recognition of a gap between what a person expects and what he receives from an important interpersonal relationship, from his career, or from other activities, may topple him into a depression"2, and "The tendency to compare oneself with others further lowers self-esteem"3. But Beck does not center his analysis on the self-comparisons. It is the systematic development of this idea which provides the new thrust in Self- comparisons Analysis as offered here.

The State of Your Life As You Perceive It to Be

Your "actual" state is what you perceive it to be, of course, rather than what it "really" is. 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 your 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.

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