A Success Story

Here is the story of a woman journalist, Nancy Chevalier, who learned that she was not helpless to control her depression, and has actually done:

After my long ordeal, I came to realize that all the doctors and pills and therapies psychiatry had to offer would never be enough. Somehow, I would have to build up my own resistance to this horrible mental illness. I, myself, would have to develop some control over it.

In addition to taking the medication, I began to walk an hour every day, to do every volunteer job I could find and to take up creative writing and yoga. I listened to music--all kinds of music at all hours of the day and night. Charlie Byrd, Vivaldi, Johann Strauss, Stan Getz--all played a role in my self-styled therapy.

Although I had never been a good dancer, I began to twirl around the living room, fantasizing I was in Vienna in a gorgeous ball gown, waltzing the night away.

In my fantasy, I imagined that there was a mangy black dog on my shoulders, but I waltzed so fast that he finally couldn't hang on any longer, so he fell to the floor and ran off. And I just kept on dancing the whole night through.

The visualization was so powerful that I literally felt myself to be there in Vienna, in that ballroom. No one could be depressed in that ballroom. I would not be depressed; I would be well and happy. I told myself this over and over again while listening to the music. After several weeks, the depression lifted and I was well once more...

For over three years now, I have managed to keep my illness at arm's length by taking my medication and using these various techniques.

Two years ago, while vacationing with my husband on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, severe depression struck once again. But I made up my mind to try to control it. Although barely functioning, I drove 30 miles to the nearest drugstore, where I located some dusty tapes of Strauss waltzes, which I then played day and night. At first, I could only move one finger slowly to the music, but I kept on playing the tapes over and over. I told myself that I would not be depressed in Hawaii, I would be joyful in Vienna. The music and visualization worked and the depression disappeared in a few weeks.

That mangy black dog is still there; he didn't die and I know it. I can sometimes feel him lurking around. But as he approaches me and begins to pounce, I take out my medication, my writing notebook and my waltz tapes and I scare him off. It's all I can do, but I do it so faithfully and fiercely that I like to believe that I've gotten rid of him forever. And maybe, just maybe, I have. (Chevalier, 1990, pp. 12-14.)

My own is another story of learning that I could control the depression - though at first only one day a week - and then successfully doing so for more than 17 years now without relapse, after 13 years of depression. (See the Introduction and Epilogue for more details.)

Summary

Self-comparisons are the final common path through which all depressing forces exert their influence. And if the person feels helpless to improve her situation, the sense of helplessness combines with the negative self-comparisons to cause sadness; this is the core mechanism of depression. A helpless, hopeless attitude along with neg-comps leads to sadness and depression.

Often people feel helpless because they have "learned" to think that they are helpless in circumstances which another person would feel capable of changing in order to improve the neg-comp.

One obvious tactic is to realize that you are not helpless and you can change your actual state of affairs so that the comparison will be less negative. Sometimes this requires gradual re-learning through a graded series of tasks which show you that you can be successful, eventually leading to success in tasks that at the beginning seemed overwhelmingly difficult to you.

Sometimes you can change your state of belief about what you can do so, in order to feel less helpless.

Another way to increase your sense of mastery and decrease your sense of being helpless is by a graded series of practice exercises which demonstrate that you can indeed do more than you think you can. It is important to arrange the practices in such fashion that they do not arouse the very sense of helplessness that is being attacked.

next: Good Mood: The New Psychology of Overcoming Depression Chapter 18