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Page 1 of 5 Negative Self-Comparisons, Combined With A Helpless Feeling, Are The Proximate Cause of Depression
Roadmap Note: The book is organized so that you can go directly from the overall summary in Chapter 1 to the get-to-work self-help procedures in Part III (Chapters 10 to 20), without pausing to read further about the nature of depression and its elements in Part II (Chapters 3 to 9). But if you have the patience to study a bit more before moving on the self-help procedures, it will be worth your while to first read through Part II, which expands greatly on Chapter 1. Or, you can come back and read the rest of Part II later. ***
When you are depressed you feel sad; this is the basic fact about the condition called "depression." The feeling of sadness is accompanied by the thought "I'm worthless." An attitude of "I'm helpless" is a precursor of the sadness, and the belief "I ought to be different than I am" usually helps keep the person locked into sadness. Our first task, then, is to understand sadness--to learn what causes sadness, what relieves sadness, and what prevents sadness.
The Importance of Negative Self-Comparisons
Attempts to distinguish `normal' from `abnormal' sadness have not proven useful. Apparently there is but a single sort of sad feeling; the pain is the same whether it follows upon the loss of a friend (a "normal" event) or, say, the keenly-felt loss of an honor which it was not reasonable for you to expect but which you had nevertheless set your heart on. This makes sense when we notice that one does not distinguish between the pain from a finger that got cut in an accident, and the pain of a self-inflicted cut on the finger. The contexts are very different, however, in the cases of the two sorts of loss mentioned above, and it is those contexts that distinguish between the depressed person and the person who suffers from a "normal" sadness.
We must know, then: Why does one person respond to a particular negative event in his/her life with short-lived sadness after which normal cheerful life reappears, whereas another responds to a similar event with persistent depression? And why does a trivial or almost nonexistent blemish in life trigger sadness in some people and not in others?
The answer in brief is as follows: Some people acquire from their personal histories: 1) a tendency to make frequent negative self-comparisons, and therefore a tendency to have a Rotten Mood Ratio; 2) a tendency to think one is helpless to change the events that enter into the Rotten Ratio; and 3) a tendency to insist that one's life should be better than it is.
Concerning the first of these elements, the tendency to make frequent negative self-comparisons: This does not mean quite the same as "thinking poorly of yourself" or "having low self- esteem." The differences will be explained later.
There are many possible interacting elements in the development of a propensity to make neg-comps (negative self- comparisons), conceivably including a genetic element, and the elements differ from person to person. Understanding this mechanism is a necessary forerunner to designing the appropriate cure as discussed in Part III. The neg-comp is the last link in the causal chain leading to sadness and depression, the "common pathway", in medical parlance. If we can remove or alter this link, we can relieve depression.
To repeat, the central element in your sadness and depression, and the key to your cure, is as follows: You feel sad when a) you compare your actual situation with some "benchmark" hypothetical situation, and the comparison appears negative; and b) you think you are helpless to do anything about it. This analysis may seem obvious to you after you reflect on it, and many great philosophers have touched on it. But this key idea has had little place in the psychological literature on depression, though the negative self-comparison is the key to understanding and treating depression.
The element of "negative thoughts" has been mentioned by just about every writer on depression through the ages, as has been the more specific set of negative thoughts that make up low self-evaluation. And controlled laboratory experiments have recently shown that depressed people remember fewer instances of being rewarded for successful performance than do non-depressed subjects, and remember more instances of being punished for unsuccessful performance. Depressed subjects also reward themselves less frequently when told to decide which responses were successful and which were not1.
Negative thoughts have not, however, been previously discussed in a systematic fashion as comprising comparison, as every evaluation is by nature a comparison. Nor has the interaction between the neg-comps and the sense of helplessness, which converts neg-comps into sadness and depression, been described elsewhere as it is here. It is the conceptualization of the negative thoughts as negative self-comparisons which opens up the wide variety of theoretical and curative approaches discussed here.
After you grasp this idea, you see its traces in many places. For example, notice the casual mention of self- comparisons in these remarks of Beck that "the repeated recognition of a gap between what a person expects and what he receives from an important interpersonal relationship, from his career, or from other activities, may topple him into a depression"2, and "The tendency to compare oneself with others further lowers self-esteem"3. But Beck does not center his analysis on the self-comparisons. It is the systematic development of this idea which provides the new thrust in Self- comparisons Analysis as offered here.
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