Conquering Depression Enjoying Life

New Dimensions and Better Ratios

If you can't make the old Mood Ratio livable, then consider getting a new one. This is the way all of us treat a troublesome washing machine or a broken violin, and it also is a sound way to proceed with troublesome self-comparison ratios.

Finding the basis for personal comparisons on which one comes up positive is, in fact, the way that most people construct an image of themselves which makes them look good, to themselves and to others.

The life strategy of the healthy-minded person is to find a dimension on which he or she performs relatively well, then argue to oneself and to others that it is the most important dimension on which to judge a person.

A 1954 song by Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen went like this: "You've got to accentuate the positive...Eliminate the negative...Latch on to the affirmative...Don't mess with Mister In-between." That sums up how most people arrange their view of the world and themselves so that they have self-respect. This is often unpleasant to other people, because the person who accentuates her or his own strengths is thereby accentuating what in other people is less positive. And the person often proclaims intolerantly that that dimension is the most important one of all. But this may be the price of self-respect and non-depression to many people--much of the price being paid by others.

A more attractive illustration: appreciating your own courage is often an excellent way to shift dimensions. If you have been struggling without much success for years to convince the world that your fish-meal protein is an effective and cheap way of preventing protein-deficiency diseases in poor children (an actual case), you may be greatly saddened if you dwell on the comparison between what you have achieved and what you aspire to achieve. But if you focus instead upon your courage in making this brave fight, even in the face of the lack of success, then you will give yourself an honest and respectable positive comparison which will make you feel happy rather than sad, and which will lead you to esteem yourself well rather than poorly.

Another example: Bert F. is a poet who has struggled for years to win readers and respect for his poetry--with only occasional small success and never a really big success. Whether it is his ideas or his unconventionally simple style that keep him from succeeding, he does not know. He continues to believe that his poetry is fine and exciting work, but the overwhelming critical disinterest in his work finally wore him down and left him depressed. After months of deep sadness he decided that he could at least give himself high marks for courage and fortitude. And now when his mind turns to the failure of his poems, he consciously directs his mind to his courage--and this lifts his spirit. There are many physically-disabled persons who struggle to learn and work against tough odds, and who keep up their spirits with much the same device.

Counting one's blessings is the traditional label for the act of focusing on dimensions that will make us happy: remembering one's good health when one loses one's money; remembering one's wonderful loving children when the job is a failure; remembering one's good friends when a false friend betrays one, or when a friend dies; and so on.

This anecdote--a question put to former astronaut Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr.--shows how a person may shift to new dimensions of life to find happiness.

The aftermath of Apollo II made me realize that I had no idea what I was looking for in my life. It took hospitalization for psychiatric treatment and the acceptance of myself as an alcoholic to make me see that faith, hope and love for people are infinitely better goals than individual achievement. (Family Weekly, February 26, l978, p. 2)

Some people, however, are not so flexible in their choice of dimensions on which to compare themselves; they cannot choose at will the best "line of goods" for them to carry. For others this is a matter of basic values; they will not accord importance to characteristics simply because it is psychologically convenient to do so. In some cases, people seem to get stuck with dimensions that cause them sadness because of destructive implanted values in childhood, for example, that one should get maximum formal education, or that one should not think bad thoughts. In some other cases, people seem to purposely focus only on dimensions which make them look bad in their self-comparisons; all of us have met people who live exemplary lives in all apparent respects but who flay themselves with scourging whips because they think they don't do enough for the community or for their aged parents or relatives.

How can you, even if you are the type that doesn't typically change dimensions of evaluation to suit your own psychological convenience, do so anyway? One way is to demand of yourself that you do so in the name of a higher value. This is another example of Values Therapy, and this is what cured me of my l3-year-long depression. The higher value was the welfare of my children, which I believed was being threatened by my continued depression. In my hierarchy of values, the welfare of my children was all-important. Therefore, I decided that I simply would not allow myself to make the comparisons of my actual occupational achievements to the aspirations I have had for my work, or to the achievements of some others whose work has been better received than mine. I determined that whenever such comparisons came into my mind I would either turn my mind toward other comparisons such as the wonderful health of our family relative to the bad health that luck could have given us, or to the happy home life I mostly have, or to the useful role I play in the lives of some friends and colleagues, or the peacefulness of our lives--or else I would make no comparisons at all. More about this in a moment.

The Sound of a Numerator Clapping

No self-comparisons, no sadness. And no sadness means no depression. So why don't we just get rid of self-comparisons completely?

A practicing Zen Buddhist with an independent income and a grown family can get along without making many self-comparisons. But for those of us who must struggle to achieve our ends in the workaday world, some self-comparisons are necessary to keep us directed toward achieving these ends. Nevertheless we can, if we try, reduce the number of self-comparisons by doing other things instead.

Absorbing work is perhaps the most effective device. It is usually available, and it requires no special discipline. While you are thinking about the task at hand, your attention is effectively diverted from comparing yourself to some benchmark standard. After my first year of depression, it was my ability to dive down into work for two to four hours every morning that gave me some respite from my constant pain of sadness and awareness of worthlessness.

Many depressed people do not manage to work. This may be because they feel hopeless that the work will amount to anything. But others may not work because they are not aware of the enormous therapeutic possibilities of work.