Good Mood: The New Psychology of Overcoming Depression Chapter 1

Written by Julian L. Simon

THE NATURE OF THE TROUBLE AND THE FORMS OF HELP

What Does "Depression" Mean?

The term "depression" means to psychiatrists and psychologists a continued state of mind with these central characteristics: (1) You are sad or "blue." (2) You have a low regard for yourself. In addition, (3) a sense of being helpless and hopeless is an integral part of the depression process. A variety of other symptoms such as poor sleep may or may not accompany these two core symptoms. They are not central to the depression.

Sadness is not equivalent to depression, and not all sadness is pathological. Everyone is sad from time to time, sometimes in response to genuinely sad events such as the loss of a loved one. The sadness that follows such a loss is natural and even necessary, and should be accepted as such. Unless the sadness continues un-normally -- that is, continues so long that it disturbs a person's life, and the person feels that there is something wrong -- the label "depression" does not apply. But if the sadness does continue un-normally, and then picks up a feeling of worthlessness as a companion and turns into a prolonged state, the condition then becomes an enemy to be fought.

Very occasionally there may be some doubt about whether to call a person "depressed", especially when sadness continues for a long time after a tragic death. In such a case, the person may not feel worthless. But almost always depression is clear-cut, though the depth of depression may vary.

Sadness is caused by the mechanism which will be described shortly. If you understand and manipulate the mechanism properly, you can get rid of the sadness. The depression mechanism does not by itself produce or explain low self-regard. But if you operate the mechanism appropriately, you are likely to get rid of the low self-regard, too, and at the least you will not be preoccupied with it and ravaged by it.

This is the mechanism which causes the sadness in depression: Whenever you think about yourself in a judgmental fashion--which most of us frequently do--your thought takes the form of a comparison between a) the state you think you are in (including your skills and capacities) and b) some other hypothetical "benchmark" state of affairs. The benchmark situation may be the state you think you ought to be in, or the state you formerly were in, or the state you expected or hoped to be in, or the state you aspire to achieve, or the state someone else told you you must achieve. This comparison between actual and hypothetical states makes you feel bad if the state in which you think you are in is less positive than the state you compare yourself to. And the bad mood will become a sad mood rather than an angry or determined mood if you also feel helpless to improve your actual state of affairs or to change your benchmark.

We can write the comparison formally as a Mood Ratio:

Mood=(Perceived state of oneself) (Hypothetical benchmark state)

If the numerator (perceived state of oneself) in the Mood Ratio is low compared to the denominator (hypothetical benchmark state) --a situation which I'll call a Rotten Ratio--your mood will be bad. If on the contrary the numerator is high compared to the denominator--a state which I'll call a Rosy Ratio--your mood will be good. If your Mood Ratio is Rotten and you feel helpless to change it, you will feel sad. Eventually you will be depressed if a Rotten Ratio and a helpless attitude continue to dominate your thinking. This precise formulation constitutes a new theoretical understanding of depression.

The comparison you make at a given moment may concern any one of many possible personal characteristics--your occupational success, your personal relationships, your state of health, or your morality, for just a few examples. Or you may compare yourself on several different characteristics from time to time.

If the bulk of your self-comparison thoughts are negative over a sustained period of time, and you feel helpless to change them, you will be depressed. Check yourself and you will observe in your mind such a negative self-comparison ("neg-comp" for short) when you feel bad, whether or not the sadness is part of a general depression.

Only with this Self-Comparisons Analysis can we make sense of such exceptional cases as the person who is poor in the world's goods but nevertheless is happy, and the person who "has everything" but is miserable; not only do their actual situations affect their feelings, but also the benchmark comparisons they set up for themselves.

The sense of loss, which often is associated with the onset of depression, also can be seen as a negative self-comparison (neg-comp) -- a comparison between the way things were before the loss, and the way they are after the loss. A person who never had a fortune does not experience the loss of a fortune in a stock market crash and therefore cannot suffer grief and depression from losing it. Losses that are irreversible, such as the death of a loved one, are particularly saddening because you are helpless to do anything about the comparison. But the concept of comparisons is a more fundamental logical element in thought processes than is loss, and therefore it is a more powerful engine of analysis and treatment.

The key element for understanding and dealing with depression, then, is the sadness-producing negative comparison between one's actual state and one's benchmark hypothetical situation, together with the attitude of helplessness as well as the conditions that lead a person to make such comparisons frequently and acutely.