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

Good Mood

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Good Mood:
The New Psychology
of Overcoming Depression

Chapter 4

cont.

Then along comes some unpleasant event, minor or major, that leads to a negative self-comparison between, on the one hand, what you think about yourself in light of the event, and on the other hand, the standard which you take as your benchmark for comparison. The consequent sadness will be only temporary when the event is not seen as all-important or is surrounded by a lot of other negative indications: the effects of the death of a loved one upon a person with generally high self-esteem is such an example. But if your Life Report is predominantly negative in the categories marked "important," then any negative event will be reinforced by the overall sense of worthlessness, and will in turn contribute to your feeling worthless. This gives extra strength to each particular negative self-comparison. And when (or if) the thought of that particular negative self-comparison leaves you, the generalized negative self-comparison of being worthless keeps you feeling sad. When that state continues for a time, we call it depression.

When talking of his own depressed thoughts, Tolstoy put the matter this way: "[Like drops of ink always falling on one place they ran together into one big blot." (4)

How does one happen to have a negative Life Report? These are possible contributing factors, a) one's childhood training and upbringing, b) one's present life situation, including the recent past and the expected future, and c) an innate predisposition to react fearfully or otherwise negatively toward events. The last of these possibilities is pure speculation; no evidence has yet been shown for its existence.

The role of the present is straightforward: It provides evidence that you interpret about how well you are doing with various matters, and how well you can hope to do in the future.

The past has a multiple role: It provided--and still provides--evidence about how well you usually do on some matters.(5) But it also taught you methods --sound or unsound--to interpret and evaluate the evidence that the world provides to you about your activities and life condition. And, perhaps most important, your childhood training influences which categories you mark as "important" and "unimportant." For example, one person may consider relationship with one's family or work success as very important, whereas another person may consider neither important because of (or in reaction to) childhood experience.

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Those are some of the ways in which a depressive may differ from a normal person, differences that may cause the depressive to suffer prolonged sadness in the face of a set of external conditions whereas they cause only fleeting sadness to the normal person.

Many of the above tendencies can be summarized as a propensity for seeing a half-empty glass instead of a half-full glass. This propensity is neatly demonstrated by an experiment that showed people two images at the same time -- a positive and a negative, one in each eye--with a special viewing device. Depressed persons "saw" the unhappy image and did not "see" the happy image more frequently than persons who were not depressed (6). And other research shows that even after a siege of depression is over, the former sufferers have more negative thoughts and biases than do normal persons.

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