This analogy may help: Your mind is like a system of minor and major streams that join up to form a river, which then passes through a narrows before it flows toward your city. Sometimes the river breaks loose and floods the city. The streams are like the basic causes of the depression. You may or may not be able to identify which stream or combination of streams constitutes the original cause. And even if you are successful in identifying the causal streams, you may or may not be to dam up or re-channel it or them. But if you turn your attention to the narrows, you know that if you dam or re-channel the river at that point you can prevent the depression from flooding you with sadness.

The self-evaluative process is like the narrows. If you choke off or re-direct your thoughts at that point, you can prevent the damaging flow of negative self-comparisons.

The key element for understanding and dealing with depression, then, is the sadness- producing negative comparisons between one's actual and benchmark hypothetical situation, together with the conditions that lead a person to make such comparisons frequently and acutely and make you feel helpless to chance the situation.

How may we manipulate the comparison-producing mechanism so that we prevent the flow of negative self-comparisons? There are several possibilities for any given person; one or another may be successful, or perhaps some combination will prove best. The possibilities include: changing the numerator; changing the denominator; changing the dimensions upon which you compare yourself; and making no comparisons at all. Let's consider them one by one.

Improving Your Numerator

Are you as bad as you think you are? If you have an incorrect unflattering picture of some aspects of yourself that you consider important, then your self-comparison ratio will be negative fallaciously. That is, if you systematically bias your estimate of yourself in a manner that makes you seem to yourself objectively worse than you really are, then you open yourself to needless negative self-comparisons and depression.

Keep in mind that we are now talking about assessments of yourself that can be checked objectively. An example: Samuel G. complained that, in his terms, he was a consistent "loser" at everything he did. His counselor knew that he played ping-pong, and asked him whether he usually won or lost at ping-pong. Sam said that he usually lost. The counselor asked him to keep a record of the games he played in the following week. The record showed that Sam won a bit more often than he lost, a fact which surprised him. With that evidence in hand, he was then receptive to the idea that he was also giving himself a short count in other areas of his life, and hence unnecessarily producing a negative self-comparison ratio.

Biased self-estimates are what Beck calls "distortions of reality based on erroneous premises and assumptions" and Ellis calls "irrational thinking". Such biased assessments are similar to faulty research into the facts of your life situation. Just as a student can be taught to do valid social-science research in university, and just as a child in school can improve her information-gathering and reasoning with guided practice, so depressives in the course of psychotherapy can be taught better information-gathering and processing. And if a person judges his situation in the light of a biased sample of experience--that is, an incorrect "statistical" analysis of life data and an unsound definition of the situation--he is likely to misinterpret reality.

In many cases, bringing this habit of making biased self-assessments to depressives' attention has helped them to correct their information-gathering and information-analyzing processes, and hence to remove depression. In one case I observed, Rachel J. was a woman very successful in her profession who was often depressed for long periods of time whenever her job hit an unsuccessful outcome; in her mind she ignored all her successes while ruminating on the recent failure. I was able to teach this woman to keep in mind a wider sample of her experiences in her profession after she had a failure. This tactic lightened the pain of her sadness, and greatly shortened the periods she was depressed after professional rejections.

People can and do distort the facts about any of the aspects of their lives that are important to them Sometimes people simply have wrong information about the world and about how well others perform because they collect data in a biased fashion. One of the virtues of the "sexual revolution" is that people now have a lot more information about what other people do, and hence nowadays people are less likely to consider themselves unusual with respect to such activities as masturbation or oral sex. This means that fewer people give themselves negative self-ratings as a "sinner" or "pervert".

Others, however, underestimate themselves systematically because they have a need to compare themselves unfavorably with others. For example, Geraldine M. insisted that she was incapable of doing many ordinary things done by ordinary people, that she was "incompetent". This caused much sadness, even though she is in fact one of the most successful women in her occupation. She frequently cited her inability to ride a bicycle as an example. In exasperation, her husband found a teacher who, in two lessons, taught Geraldine to ride unassisted around a large parking lot. She never went near a bicycle again, however, continuing to insist that she could not "really" ride a bicycle and is really an incompetent person.

People like Geraldine cannot be helped simply by teaching them to collect information more accurately, as can the other type of person mentioned above. Rather, the Geraldine types must think through why they feel the need to bias the facts negatively. Some of them are afraid to accept positive facts because they are afraid they will be punished by others for doing well. For others, a rotten numerator gives them an excuse to themselves, or to others, not to do some things they don't want to do.

If you can raise your numerator--if you can find yourself to be a better person than you now think you are, on the facts--then you will make your self-comparisons more positive. By so doing you will reduce sadness, increase your good feeling, and fight depression.

Sweetening Your Denominator

"Compared to what?" Voltaire asked, when told that life is hard. The denominator is the standard of comparison that you habitually measure yourself against. Whether your self-comparison is favorable or unfavorable depends as much upon the denominator you use as upon the supposed facts of your own life. The standard of comparison can be what you hope to be, what you formerly were, what you think you ought to be, or what you think others--to whom you compare yourself--are like.