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You want evidence that people can successfully fight depression and find new happiness by one or another of these strategies. Stories of religious conversions are dramatic, as are newspaper anecdotes such as the Buzz Aldrin quote given earlier. Less- dramatic but better documented scientifically are the changes observed in depressed persons by practitioners of cognitive therapy such as Beck and Ellis, who work on clarifying people's numerators and sometimes altering their denominators. Also impressive proof that people can alter their moods by sheer decision and determination is the evidence of people's behavior on happy religious holidays, and especially the behavior of Orthodox Jews every Sabbath Saturday. No matter how miserable the person's life during the week, Jewish religious law requires that a person not be sad--not even to mourn the dead--on the Sabbath. And by and large, Orthodox Jews therefore manage to enjoy their lives on the Sabbath by demanding of themselves that they do so. In fact, though I am by no means an Orthodox Jew, three or four years before I cured my depression for seven days a week, I first found temporary surcease from my depression one day a week on the Sabbath.2
There is also rigorous scientific proof of the efficacy of cognitive therapy, proof that never existed before for any form of psychotherapy. 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." 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.
A counselor or therapist may help, of course, and may even be indispensable. But often the role played by the therapist is that of teacher, instructing you how to help yourself by new ways of thinking, which many of us are able to learn without hours of professional help.
Viewing the therapist as a "doctor" who has special helping powers that border on the miraculous may help you for a while, just as a sugar pill can bring improvement in physical ailments. If you are impressed by the promise of magic, a therapist may be able to re-educate you more effectively than a book or your own unaided powers can do alone. And of course a therapist may be a wise and experienced person who, like an experienced and wise teacher of any subject, can help you learn the ideas and the habits that fit your needs. But by no means every therapist is wise and helpful, even though highly trained. Some therapists point you in the wrong direction and mis-educate you because they cannot correctly assess what you need, or because they have been trained in only a single technique and use that technique willy-nilly even if it is appropriate for a given client, or because they are ignorant and stupid. (Yes, Virginia, people can earn Ph.D. degrees and yet be ignorant--even stupid--about everything except how to pass tests in school.)
My recommendation: First consider trying to banish your depression by yourself using the methods described here. If you can't manage satisfactorily, look for help. But be very discriminating about the therapist whom you choose, and don't be afraid to switch quickly if you judge that the therapist is not right for you. And try to understand what the therapist is doing in the framework of the New Happiness Formula.
Anti-depression Drugs, Electroshock and The Formula
Where do electroshock and anti-depression drugs fit into the picture? Drugs and electroshock can relieve painful sadness--at least after a while, and for a while--in many depression sufferers. Sometimes they also shake people out of vicious circles that keep them from making a curative attack on their problems. And sometimes these shock and drug treatments are enough to restore people to full normal life.
Electroshock and drugs sometime have physical and psychological side-effects, however. And for some people these techniques only postpone the day when they must finally reckon with the structure of their psyches, and come to grips with how they think, feel, and view the world and themselves. Furthermore, there can be great spiritual benefits in the self-understanding and self-satisfaction that one gains in mastering one's depression with one's own resources.
So--different strokes for different folks. You and your physician will have to decide about drugs and electroshock. As a general matter, however--try your own resources and Self-Comparisons Analysis first. If that works and makes drugs or electroshock unnecessary, so much the better.
Do You Really Want To Escape From Depression?
There is one indispensable element If you are to wrestle happiness out of depression: the desire not to be sad but rather to enjoy your life. At first that seems preposterous. Doesn't everyone want not to be sad? No. Many people get benefits from being sad, or are afraid of enjoying their lives, or don't want strongly enough to break out of sadness so that they are willing to make the effort to do so.
Being depressed allows you to feel sorry for yourself. Feeling sorry for yourself is the next most pleasant thing to loving yourself, and that in turn is almost as good as having others be attached to you and love you--which we all want and the lack of which is often a root cause of a person having a depressive nature. Another possible reason why a person does not fight depression is that any effort or exertion of the will implies a sort of pain, and the pain of the effort to crack the depression may seem greater than the pain of suffering from the depression. Still another reason is that the person may lack other strong desires which are inconsistent with being depressed--the desire that my children not be harmed by it, in my case. This brings us back to Values Therapy.
Some are so deeply mired in depression that they lack energy to break out of it. This latter state is "clinical depression," which may require drugs or electroshock or other radical therapy to get the person's motor started again so that the person has the will and the energy to reorganize her or his thinking to banish depression. But the reader of this piece--just because he or she has had the energy to find and read it--is not likely to be so lacking in resources with which to fight.
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