Once More With Good Feeling

Here once again in summary is the method: Check whether you can improve your numerator by accurately gathering the facts about yourself, and analyzing them appropriately. If that does not remove your depression, try sweetening your denominator by changing the standards against which you compare yourself. Next, consider evaluating yourself on dimensions different than those you now use. Additionally you may reduce the negative self-comparisons which produce sadness by reducing all comparisons and evaluations--with work, altruistic activity, or meditation.

For the person (a) whose numerator is not demonstrably at variance with the objective facts of his or her life, (b) who is not willing or able to change denominators for the sake of avoiding suffering, and (c) who will not change dimensions of comparison or stop making comparisons simply to avoid the pain of the depression, there may yet be another solution: Values Therapy. In Values Therapy you analyze your own personal desires in order to determine which values are most fundamental and important for you--your children's welfare, your spouse's welfare, your health, your contribution to others, material possessions, wealth, and so on. Then you go further and struggle to determine the hierarchy of these values--which are more important then which others. Next you consider whether achieving any of your most important values is inconsistent with being depressed--for example, the religious Jew's value for enjoying life on the Sabbath, or my value that my children have an undepressed father. If you can identify such important values, then if you are truthful with yourself you will bend every effort to force yourself to avoid negative self-comparisons even at the cost (at first) of energy and thought (later it becomes a habit), and you will give up the benefits of depression (feeling sorry for yourself, having an excuse not to do various chores, and so on).

It was this sort of values confrontation that broke my depression and allowed me to attain reasonably steady enjoyment of life, with occasional bliss and even the touch of ecstasy that is my happy lot now.

If Self-Comparisons Analysis and Values Therapy help you as much as I believe they can, this will improve my numerator, and make it even easier for me to keep winning my fight against depression. If out of my pain can come less pain and sadness for you, that, for me, is the bottom line.

FOOTNOTES

1Mathematical purists may notice that I sometimes say that this "ratio is negative" when it is really positive but less than one. When I say the "ratio is negative" I mean that the comparison of numerator to denominator is negative.
2Holidays such as Christmas also affect many depressives negatively, but that is a different sort of mechanism that need not be discussed here. The depression mechanism causes the sadness. If you under-stand and manipulate the mechanism properly, you can get rid of the sadness. Figure 4 pictures the depression mechanism. It shows the main elements that influence whether a person is sad or happy at a given moment, and whether the person does or does not descend into the prolonged gloom of depression. From left to right, these sets of elements are as follows:
(l) Experiences in childhood, both the general pattern of child-hood and particularly traumatic experiences, if any.
(2) The person's adult history, with the recent experiences having the greatest weight.
(3) The actual conditions of the individual's present life, including relationships with people, and objective factors such as health, job, finances, and so on.
(4) The person's habitual mental states, his views of the world and himself. This includes his goals, hopes, values, demands upon himself, and ideas about himself, including whether he is effective or ineffective and important or unimportant.
(5) Physical influences such as whether he is tired or rested, and anti-depression drugs if any.
(6) The machinery of thought which processes the material coming in from the other elements and produces an evaluation of how the person stands with respect to the hypothetical situation taken for compar-ison. The main lines of influence from one element-set to another are also shown in Figure 4. Figure 4 Benson, Herbert, with Miriam Z. Klipper, The Relaxation Response (New York: Avon Books, 1976).

next: An Integrated Cognitive Theory of Depression (for mental health professionals) or Abstract: An Integrated Cognitive Theory of Depression (for lay people)