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Page 6 of 6
This mechanism causes the sadness in depression: Whenever you think about yourself in a judgmental fashion, your thought takes the form of a comparison between a) the state you think you are in (including your skills and capacities) and b) some other hypothetical "benchmark" state of affairs. The benchmark situation may be the state you think you ought to be in, or the state you formerly were in, or the state you expected or hoped to be in, or the state you aspire to achieve, or the state someone else told you you must achieve. This comparison between actual and hypothetical states makes you feel bad if the state in which you think you are in is less positive than the state you compare yourself to. And the bad mood will become a sad mood rather than an angry or determined mood if you also feel helpless to improve your actual state of affairs or to change your benchmark.
If you understand and manipulate the mechanism properly, you can get rid of the sadness. The depression mechanism does not by itself produce or explain low self-regard. But if you operate the mechanism appropriately, you are likely to get rid of the low self-regard, too, and at the least you will not be preoccupied with it and ravaged by it.
We can write the comparison formally as a Mood Ratio:
Mood=(Perceived__state__of__oneself) (Hypothetical benchmark state)
If the numerator (perceived state of oneself) in the Mood Ratio is low compared to the denominator (hypothetical benchmark state) --a situation which I'll call a Rotten Ratio--your mood will be bad. If on the contrary the numerator is high compared to the denominator--a state which I'll call a Rosy Ratio--your mood will be good. If your Mood Ratio is Rotten and you feel helpless to change it, you will feel sad. Eventually you will be depressed if a Rotten Ratio and a helpless attitude continue to dominate your thinking. This precise formulation constitutes a new theoretical understanding of depression.
The comparison you make at a given moment may concern any one of many possible personal characteristics--your occupational success, your personal relationships, your state of health, or your morality, for just a few examples. Or you may compare yourself on several different characteristics from time to time.
If the bulk of your self-comparison thoughts are negative over a sustained period of time, and you feel helpless to change them, you will be depressed.
There are several ways to manipulate your mental apparatus so as to prevent the flow of negative self-comparisons about which you feel helpless. The possibilities include: changing the numerator in the Mood Ratio; changing the denominator; changing the dimensions upon which you compare yourself; making no comparisons at all; reducing your sense of helplessness about changing the situation; and using one or more of your most cherished values as an engine to propel you out of your depression. Sometimes a powerful way to break a logjam in your thinking is to get rid of some of your "oughts" and "musts", and recognize that you do not need to make the negative comparisons that have been causing your sadness.
This book, and cognitive therapy in general, do not offer you an instantly-working formula that will transport you from misery to bliss without the slightest effort or attention on your part. In order to transform yourself from being sad to being joyful you'll have to give the problem your attention and some hard work--whether you do the work alone or with the help of a professional counselor.
The book does offer you a new analytic way of understanding your depression, upon which you can build a rational, successful procedure for extricating yourself from your unhappy jam. And the cure need not wait for long years of psychotherapy, dredging up the details of your past life and reliving it all. If you do choose to get outside help, ten or twenty sessions with a therapist are par for the course.
This is not a guarantee that you will succeed with this method. But it is a promise that a speedy cure -- faster than nature's usual regenerative processes -- is possible for a large proportion of depression sufferers.
*** Note:
Chapter 1 has summarized ideas found in Part I of the book, Chapters 2-9. If you are impatient to get to the self-help procedures in Part II Chapters 10 to 19), you can go directly from here to there, without pausing now to read further about the nature of depression and its elements. But if you have the patience to study a bit more before moving on to the the self-help procedures, it may be worth your while to read through Part I first. Or you can come back to Part II later.
The discussion in this book is pitched at a higher level of abstraction than are most self-help books. Partly this is because cognitive therapy requires somewhat more mental discipline, and more willingness to be introspective, than behavioral and other therapies.14 But the higher level is also partly due to the fact that the book is aimed at psychiatrists and psychologists, too, to present to them these new ideas and methods that render more powerful some ideas and procedures they are already familiar with. And these ideas can only be presented effectively to the professions in the context of working therapy rather than in a more rarefied and theoretical context.
next: Good Mood: The New Psychology of Overcoming Depression Chapter 2
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