David Hume, as great as any philosopher who ever lived, as well as a person of cheerful "normal" temperament, describes how he reacted when his first great book had a very disappointing reception:

I had always entertained a notion that my want of success in publishing the Treatise of Human Nature, had proceeded more from the manner than the matter, and that I had been guilty of a very usual indiscretion, in going to the press too early. I therefore cast the first part of that work anew in the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, which was published while I was at Turin. But this piece was at first little more successful than the Treatise of Human Nature. On my return from Italy, I had the Mortification to find all England in a ferment, on account of Dr. Middleton's Free Enquiry, while my performance was entirely overlooked and neglected. A new edition, which had been published at London of my Essays, moral and political, met not with a much better reception.

Such is the force of natural temper, that these disappointments made little or no impression on me.(1)

"Normal" people do not, however, respond to misfortune by adapting so readily that their spirits are unaffected. A study that compared paraplegic accident victims to persons who had not suffered paralysis from accident found that the paraplegics remained less happy than the uninjured persons months after the accident2 Normal people may be flexible in adapting their thinking to their circumstances, but they are not perfectly flexible.

The Depressive

The depressive differs from the normal person in having a propensity for prolonged sadness; this is the stripped-down minimum definition of a depressive. This propensity, caused by some mental baggage or biochemical scar carried over from the past, interacts with contemporary events to maintain a state of negative self-comparison.

Much of this Part II is devoted to describing this special mental baggage of the depressive. In preview, here are several important cases:

1) The depressive may, because of her intellectual or emotional training in childhood, misinterpret actual current conditions in a negative direction so that the comparison between actual and hypothetical is perennially negative, or so that after a bit of bad fortune the return to a balanced or positive comparison is much slower than for a person who is not a depressive.

2) The depressive may have a view of the world, herself, and her obligations such that her actual conditions will necessarily always be below the hypothetical. An example is a person whose talents are not extraordinary but who was brought up to believe that her talents are such that she ought to win a Nobel prize. Hence, all her life she will feel a failure, her actual state below the hypothetical, and she will therefore be depressed.

3) The depressive may have a mental quirk which forces all comparisons to be seen as negative even if his actual conditions compare well with his counterfactual condition. For example, he may believe that all people are basically sinful, as Bertrand Russell was afflicted in his youth. Or the perennial negative self-comparison may be caused by biochemical factors to be discussed shortly.

4) The depressive may feel more acute pain from a given negative self-comparison than does the normal person. For example, the depressive might have memories of severe punishment in childhood each time his performance fell below the parental norm. Those memories of the pain from childhood punishment may intensify the pain of negative self-comparisons later on.

5) Still another difference between depressives and non- depressives is that depressives-- almost invariably while they are depressed, and in many cases also when they are not depressed--have a conviction of personal worthlessness and incompetence and lack of self esteem. This sense of worthlessness is general and persistent in depression, compared to the specific and transient sense of worthlessness everyone experiences from time to time. The person who is not depressed says, "I did badly on the job this month." The depressed person says, "I always do badly on jobs," and he thinks that he will continue to do badly in the future. The depressed person's "I'm no good" judgment seems permanent and refers to all of him, whereas the "I did badly" of the nondepressed person is temporary and refers to one part of him alone. This is an example of over generalizing, which is typical of many depressives and a source of much pain and sadness.

Perhaps depressives tend to over generalize as a general habit, and to be more absolutistic in their judgments than do normal people in most of their thinking. Or perhaps depressives confine these damaging habits of thought to self-evaluative areas of their life, which cause depression. Whichever is the case, these habitual modes of inflexible thinking can cause prolonged sadness and depression.(3)

Habitual Negative Self-Comparisons Produce A Sense of Worthlessness

A single negative self-comparison does not imply a general sense of worthlessness and lack of self-esteem. A single negative self-comparison is like a single frame of a movie that is in your consciousness at a single moment, whereas a lack of self-esteem is like an entire movie full of negative self- comparisons. In addition to the specific negative self- comparison impressions you receive from each of the movie's frames, you also take away a general impression from the movie as a whole--personal worthlessness. And when later reflecting on the movie, you may at a given moment remember either a single frame or your general impression of the movie as a whole, and both the specific and the general views give you the impression of worthlessness.

A depressive reviews so many thoughts of individual negative self-comparisons that she develops the general impression of lack of personal value--worthlessness--which reinforces the individual negative self-comparisons. The never-ending flow of neg-comps also contributes to the sense that the person is helpless to stop the flow, and causes the person to lose hope that the painful neg-comps will ever cease. The general impression of worthlessness then combines with a sense of helplessness to cause sadness. The relationship between negative self-comparisons, lack of self esteem, and sadness may be diagrammed as in Figure 4.