Depressives less exceptional than Tolstoy and Bunyan share this condition:

You rarely ever completely win the battle against sustained psychological pain. When you feel unhappy because of some silly idea and you analyze and eradicate this idea, it rarely stays away forever, but often recurs from time to time. So you have to keep reanalyzing and subduing repeatedly. You may acquire the ridiculous notion, for instance, that you cannot live without some friend's approval and may keep making yourself immensely miserable because you believe this rot. Then, after much hard thinking, you may finally give up this notion and believe it quite possible for you to live satisfactorily without your friend's approbation. Eventually, however, you will probably discover that you, quite spontaneously, from time to time revive the groundless notion that your life has no value without the approval of this--or some other--friend. And once again you feel you'd better work at beating this self-defeating idea out of your skull.(9)

But this does not mean that you are doomed to a constant and unrelenting struggle. As you learn more about yourself and your depression, and as you build habits to keep negative self- comparisons at bay, it gets easier and easier.

Let us hasten to add that you will usually find the task of depropagandizing yourself from your own self- defeating beliefs easier and easier as you persist. If you consistently seek out and dispute your mistaken philosophies of life, you will find that their influence weakens. Eventually, some of them almost entirely lose their power to harass you. Almost.(10)

Furthermore, one often develops a commitment to remaining free of depression, just as a person who has stopped smoking has an investment in keeping a "clean record" and sustaining his or her success. One then feels a justifiable pride that helps keep you on the rails and away from sustained depression.

One Stroke For All?

Self-comparisons Analysis makes clear that many sorts of influences, perhaps in combination with each other, can produce persistent sadness. From this it follows that many sorts of interventions may be of help to a depression sufferer. That is, different causes--and there are many different causes, as most psychiatrists have finally concluded, call for different therapeutic interventions. Furthermore, there may be several sorts of intervention that can help any particular depression. Yet all these interventions may be traced to the "common pathway" of negative self-comparisons.

In short, different strokes for different folks. In contrast, however, each of the various schools of psychological therapy--psychoanalytic, behavioral, religious, and so on--does its own thing no matter what the cause of the person's depression, on the assumption that all depressions are caused in the same way. Furthermore, each school of thought insists that its way is the only true therapy.

Self-comparisons Analysis points a depression sufferer toward whichever is the most promising tactic to banish the depression. It focuses on understanding why you make negative self-comparisons, and then develops ways of preventing the neg- comps, rather than focusing on merely understanding and reliving the past, or on simply changing contemporary habits. With this understanding you can choose how best to fight your own depression and achieve happiness.

In a capsule: Your thoughts about yourself cause your depression, though of course your thoughts may be prompted by conditions outside you. To overcome your depression, you must think about yourself in ways different than your habitual patterns. Self-comparisons Analysis systematically suggests many possible kinds of change.

There are also some unsystematic tactics that sometimes effectively change your thinking about yourself. One of these is humor -- jokes about your situation, as well as humorous songs. (Albert Ellis is big on these).(11) The switch in perspective that is the heart of much humor causes you to view your situation less seriously, and in that fashion takes the sting out of the negative self-comparisons that the humor makes fun of.

Viktor Frankl uses a method he calls "paradoxical intention" which radically switches a person's perspective in a fashion akin to humor. Often this is akin to the Values Treatment discussed in Chapter 18. Consider this case of Frankl's:

A young physician consulted me because of his fear of perspiring. Whenever he expected an outbreak of perspiration, this anticipatory anxiety was enough to precipitate excessive sweating. In order to cut this circle formation I advised the patient, in the event that sweating should recur, to resolve deliberately to show people how much he could sweat. A week later he returned to report that whenever he met anyone who triggered his anticipatory anxiety, he said to himself, "I only sweated out a quart before, but now I'm going to pour at least ten quarts!" The result was that, after suffering from his phobia for four years, he was able, after a single session, to free himself permanently of it within one week.(12) Frankl's procedure can be understood in terms of altering negative self-comparisons. Frankl asks the patient (who must have some power of imagination for the method to work) to imagine that his actual state of affairs is different than what it is. Then he leads the person to compare the actual with that imagined state, and to see that the actual state is preferable to the imagined state. This produces a positive self-comparison in place of the former negative self-comparison, and hence removes sadness and depression.

Are the Best Things In Life Free?

"The best things in life are free," says the song. In money terms, that may be true. But the real best things in life--such as true happiness, and the end to prolonged sadness--are not free in terms of effort. Not to recognize this can be disastrous.

The failure of all popular remedies for depression arises from their unwillingness to recognize that every anti-depression tactic has its cost. As with a farmer, giving up the struggle to plant and raise a crop means not having a harvest and not making a living. To avoid going to parties or business meetings that lead to negative self-comparisons is to forego the pleasures or profits that may also be present there. Another misleading example is the popular recommendation to "accept yourself as you are."

Accepting yourself certainly can have its benefits. But there is also a drawback with simply accepting--either "accepting yourself," in the popular sense, or making no comparisons, as in Eastern meditative practices. If one wants to change one's habits or personality in order to improve or remedy a difficulty, one cannot avoid making comparisons. You cannot conduct any program of self-improvement without comparing and evaluating various modes of behavior.