With the facts in hand, Nancy can laugh at her error in judgment, and respond "The hell you say", when the uninvited thought "I'm a bad mother" floats into her mind. Getting rid of the Rotten Ratio makes her feel less pain, less sad, and less depressed.

This process is like scientific surveys such as a census, which check on casual generalizations such as that the death rate is going up, or people are getting poorer. If we could form valid generalizations without a census, we would not need to go to so much expense and trouble as we do. This is one more example of how a depressive's difficulty in thinking clearly is little different than our overall human problem of thinking clearly and arriving at sound conclusions.

Here is an example from Don F., a reader of an early draft of this book, about an event as he was emerging a from black depression following a breakup with his wife:

That night I had terrible dreams, all concerning confronting Linna and her new husband as a couple, coming face to face with the fact that she prefers some abusive maniac to me. By the time I got to work I was well on the way to feeling worthless.

Fortunately, that morning your manuscript was on my desk. As I read I began to see how I've distorted reality. Linna did not leave me for an abusive man because I am worthless. She became obsessed with an abusive man because she is a fruitcake. I do not have to feel depressed over that.

Can You Always Improve Your Numerator?

Improving your numerator by assessing your life more realistically is not always a cure. Many of the negative self- comparisons that make one sad may be factually correct. You may indeed be in the bottom fifth of your class in high school, doing poorly relative to most of your classmates. You may really have lost a leg in an accident. It is no wonder that Beck finds that "It is often difficult for the patient to accept the idea that his interpretations are incorrect, or at least inaccurate." To assert that these conditions are distortions of reality is itself a distortion of reality which may later come home to roost with more pain. Distortions of reality in one's thinking process should be attacked with cognitive therapy. But factually-correct unfavorable self-comparisons that cause sadness should be attacked with one or another of the other approaches described here.

Indeed, a solid body of research in recent years 2.1 suggests that depressives are more accurate in their assessments of the facts concerning their lives than are non-depressives, who tend to have an optimistic bias. This raises interesting philosophical questions about the virtue of such propositions as "Know thyself", and "The unexamined life is not worth living", but we need not pursue them here.

Cognitive treatment of the numerator also is not appropriate if the root of your problem is not illogic or misinformation but is particular values and hopes. For example, Ruth Y. is a child psychologist who devotes her time and energy to doing research on depression in children from a totally new angle. For a long time she has had little success and no professional recognition, which saddens her. A cognitive therapist might tell her to stop fooling herself, and to turn her energies to something different. But she replies that even though the chances of success are small, the benefits to people will be very great if she does succeed. And if she could look back at age eighty and feel that she had made such a contribution to people she would feel that her life was well-lived.

If this child psychologist has a reasonable idea of the odds facing her, it would be most presumptuous for a therapist to try to "straighten her out," or "show her the errors in her thinking." Rather, her best chance of cure may lie in Values Treatment of the sort described in Chapter 18.

Cognitive treatment of the numerator sometimes shades over into just plain lying to a person. "You are bound to find a job if you keep on looking for another month," or "There are lots of women who are less attractive than you who have made it in the movies," or "You weren't really trying to hurt your wife when you broke her jaw, you were just trying to give her a love tap." But such lying is likely to be disastrous with a depressed person, even aside from its ethics. Depressed people are experts in avoiding even true facts which would show them in a good light, and a fortiori they are even more effective at spotting falsehoods of that sort.

If a person is good at accepting self-supportive lies or half-truths in order to avoid the pain caused by negative self- comparisons, the person is unlikely to be a depressive; rather, schizophrenia or paranoia is the likely illness in such situations. And a depressive becomes even more depressed when he or she comes to feel that the truth as seen by other people is not flattering, and lying is necessary to construct an attractive picture.

Let's assume you understand that eliminating inaccurate self-assessments will reduce sadness and depression by improving the numerator in your Mood Ratio. Let's also assume that you have uncovered one or more ways in which you frequently bias your numerator against yourself. To benefit from this discovery you must develop the habit of correcting your biased assessments whenever they spring into your mind, or even better, adopt the habit of not even allowing such negatively-biased assessments into your mind at all. But how may this be done?

The recipe is simple--deceptively simple: By exerting effort, by practice, and by rewarding yourself for doing so, you build a habit of not making incorrect self-assessments. On the one hand this recipe is nothing more than everyday folk wisdom. On the other hand, this recipe is the staple of modern-day behavioral therapy, which uses various ingenious ways of rewarding people for repeating the desired behavior and for not repeating undesired behavior.