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 6

cont.

I felt that what I had been standing on had collapsed and that I had nothing left under my feet. What I had lived on no longer existed, and there was nothing left.

My life came to a standstill. I could breathe, eat, drink, and sleep, and I could not help doing these things; but there was no life, for there were no wishes the fulfillment of which I could consider reasonable. If I de- sired anything, I knew in advance that whether I satisfied my desire or not, nothing would come of it. Had a fairy come and offered to fulfill my desires I should not have known what to ask. If in moments of intoxication I felt something which, though not a wish, was a habit left by former wishes, in sober moments I knew this to be a delusion and that there was really nothing to wish for. I could not even wish to know the truth, for I guessed of what it consisted. The truth was that life is meaningless. I had as it were lived, lived, and walked, walked, till I had come to a precipice and saw clearly that there was nothing... ahead of me but destruction. It was impossible to stop, impossible to go back, and impossible to close my eyes or avoid seeing that there was nothing ahead but suffering and real death--complete annihilation.1

Some writers use the term "existential despair" to describe the same phenomenon.

A collapse in values often results from philosophical and linguistic misunderstanding of such key concepts as "meaning" and "life". These concepts seem obvious at first thought. But they are in fact often obscure and misleading, both the concepts and the words which stand for them. Making clear the confusion often reveals the implicit values.

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The sense of loss of meaning is usually followed by depression, though it sometimes is followed by uncontrolled elation or by a violent oscillation between the two poles. The basic idea of this book, negative self-comparisons, explains this phenomenon: Before the event, actuality and the person's values were in balance or positive most of the time. But with the removal of one's customary values there is no longer a basis of hypothetical comparison for one's activities. Hence the result of the comparison is indeterminate but very large in one direction or the other, because there is no boundary to the comparison. The comparison is more likely to be negative than positive because the former values are likely to have been a support for, rather than a constraint of, the person's activities and life style.

Values Can Cure the Sickness Values Cause

The most interesting curative possibility for collapse of values is the discovery of new values, or the re-discovery of neglected old ones. This is what happened to Tolstoy, when he later came to believe that life itself is its own value, a belief which he also thought characterized peasant life.

Values Treatment for collapse of values will be discussed in detail in Chapter 18. We should here note, however, that though values are interwoven from childhood into the very foundations of a person's character and personality, they are nevertheless subject to change as an adult. That is, values can be accepted and rejected as a matter of personal choice, though one cannot do so lightly and casually.

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