Good Mood: The New Psychology of Overcoming Depression Introduction

Written by Julian L. Simon

Note to editor: all references which are now in parentheses, in the form of a name and a data, should be numbered as footnotes and placed at the end of the book with the other footnotes, chapter by chapter. The references might best be grouped as a bibliography-reading list, with the footnotes referring to them by name and date.

Are you sad? Do you have a low opinion of yourself? Does a sense of helplessness and hopelessness weigh you down? Do you feel this way for days or weeks at a time? Those are the elements of depression.

If this is how you are feeling, you surely want to regain a pleasant outlook on life. You also need to prevent depression returning later. Happily, there now are aids to attain those goals. (But fighting depression takes effort. And there are certain benefits of being depressed which you may be reluctant to give up.)

Nowadays, a depression sufferer usually can get relief with active cognitive psychotherapy, or with tested anti-depressant medications, or with both. The U. S. Public Health Service summarizes as follows: "Eighty percent of people with serious depression can be treated successfully. Medication or psychological therapies, or combinations of both usually relieve symptoms in weeks."1 Both kinds of treatment have been shown in controlled experimental research to benefit a large proportion of depression sufferers, within a few months or even weeks. Drugs, however, control the depression, whereas psychological therapy can cure it. (For information about the scientific results, see Appendix B and the books cited in the reference list.) All this is good news indeed for depression sufferers.

Only a quarter century ago, medical and psychological science had little to offer depressed people. Traditional Freudian-based therapy put you on a couch or in an easy chair, and started you talking at random. You and your therapist hoped that in the course of two to five expensive hour-long sessions a week, continuing for many months or years, you would come across sensitive incidents in your past. Those "insights" were expected to relieve you of the pain the incidents induced. But the success rate was not high, nor was psychoanalysis proven effective by scientific tests.

Traditional therapy was founded upon the crucial assumption that people are irresistibly disturbed by their past experiences, and cannot change their emotional life by changing their current patterns of thinking. Recent scientific research has shown, however, that this assumption is false. People can indeed overcome depression by changing their current thought patterns. That is, though you may have been disturbed by events in your past, you now (in Albert Ellis's phrase) disturb yourself by your current mental habits.

Modern cognitive therapy -- which fully coincides with the wisdom of the ages on this point -- begins with the assumption that we have considerable control over our own thinking. We can choose what we will think about, even though following through on the choice requires effort and is not always fully successful. We can select our goals, even though the goals are not infinitely flexible. We can decide how much we will agonize over particular events, though our minds are not as obedient as we would like them to be. We can learn better ways to understand the data of our objective situations, just as students learn to gather and analyze data scientifically, rather than being forced to accept the biased assessments we have tended to make until now.

This book teaches you a newly-sharpened version of cognitive psychotherapy that has a more comprehensive theoretical base and wider curative outlook than earlier versions. You may use it by yourself to overcome depression, or you may use it in conjunction with a therapist. Most sufferers can benefit from the assistance of a wise counselor, though finding such a helpful person is not easy.

{In?} There is still more good news: Psychiatrist Kenneth Colby, famous for his artificial-intelligence computer simulation of paranoia, has developed a computer-based system of psychotherapy for depression based on the key ideas of this book. You "speak" to the computer, and the computer speaks back on the screen, which helps you help yourself. A disk to run the program on an IBM-PC computer is included with this book. It can be a help and a comfort to many readers.

My Personal Story and Negative Self-Comparisons

This book emerges not only from the body of new scientific discoveries, others' and my own, but also from my personal experience of deep and prolonged melancholy. Here is my story.

I was depressed -- badly depressed -- for thirteen long years from early 1962 to early l975. When I say that I was depressed I mean that, except for some of the hours when I was working or playing sports or making love, I was almost continuously conscious of being miserable, and I almost continuously reflected on my worthlessness. I wished for death, and I refrained from killing myself only because I believed that my children needed me, just as all children need their father. Endless hours every day I reviewed my faults and failures, which made me writhe in pain. I refused to let myself do the pleasurable things that my wife wisely suggested I do, because I thought that I ought to suffer.

As I look back now, in comparison to re-living the better of the days when I felt as I did then, I'd rather have a tooth pulled and have the operation bungled, or have the worst possible case of flu. And in comparison to re-living the worse of those days in the first year or two, I'd rather have a major operation or be in a hellish prison.

Over the years I consulted psychiatrists and psychologists from several traditional schools of thought. A couple of them left me with the impression that they didn't have a clue about what I was saying and had simply somehow passed the necessary exams to get into a well-paying business. A couple of them were human, understanding, and interesting to talk to, but could not help me. And toward the end of that time, the psychiatrists and psychologists did not even offer me hope, and certainly no hope of a quick cure. My own training in psychology was no help, either.