Still another way a person can produce many negative self- comparisons is by putting disproportionate weight on single negative instances. A non-depressive girl will react to the information that she has failed an exam or received a reprimand from the boss by combining this instance with her entire past record. And if this is the first failed test in her school history, or the first reprimand on this job, the non-depressive girl will see this instance as being somewhat exceptional and therefore not deserving of great attention. But some people (all of us do it sometimes) will, on the basis of this one instance, make a faulty generalization about their present conditions with respect to this dimension of the person's life. Or, one may make an inaccurate generalization about one's whole life on this dimension based on this one instance. The depressive carpenter who loses a job once may generalize, "I can't hold onto a job," and the depressive basketball player may generalize, "I'm a lousy athlete" after one poor game on the basketball court.

A person's judgment may also be inaccurate because he or she puts too little emphasis on a present event. A woman who has learned athletics late in life may continue to think of herself as unathletic, though her present achievements make the past irrelevant in this respect.

The Causes of Distortion

Why should some people's interpretations of their present conditions and life experiences be inaccurate or distorted in such manner that depression is brought on? There are several possible factors acting singly or together, including early training in thinking, extent of education, fears caused by present and past experience, and physical condition. These will now be discussed in turn.

Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck explain most depression as due to poor thinking and distorted interpretations of present reality. And they analyze the present operation of the mechanism without delving into the past causes of such bad thinking. They believe that just as a student can be taught to do valid social-science research in a university, and just as a child in school can improve his or her information-gathering and reasoning with guided practice, so can depressives be taught better information- gathering and processing, by education in the course of psychotherapy.

Indeed, it is reasonable that if you judge your situation in the light of a biased sample of experience, an incorrect "statistical" analysis of your life's data, and an unsound definition of the situation, you are likely to misinterpret your reality. For example, anthropologist Molly H. was often depressed for long periods of time whenever one of her professional papers was rejected by a professional journal. She ignored all her acceptances and successes, and focused only on the present rejection. Ellis' and Beck's sort of "cognitive therapy" trained Molly to consider a wider sample of her life experience after such a rejection, and hence reduced her sadness and shortened her depressed periods.

Burns prepared an excellent list of the main ways that depressed patients distort their thinking. They are included as an after note to the chapter.

Poor childhood training in thinking, and subsequent lack of schooling, may be responsible for an adult's misinterpretation of reality in some cases. But the lack of strong relationship between, on the one hand, amount of schooling, and on the other hand, propensity to depression, casts doubt on poor mental training as a complete explanation in many cases. More plausible is that a person's fears cooperate with poor training. Few of us reason well in the midst of panic; when fire breaks out few of us think as clearly about the situation as if we were sitting quietly, and coolly considering such a situation. Similarly, if a person greatly fears failure in school or profession or in an interpersonal relationship because the person was severely punished for such failure when young, then the fear may panic the person into poor thinking about such an occurrence when it happens. The genesis and cure of such poor thinking will be discussed in following sections.

Sometimes a current major catastrophe such as loss of a loved one, a physical disability, or a tragedy in the community, triggers depression. Normal people recover from grief, and find satisfying lives again, and in a "reasonable" length of time. But a depressive may not recover. Why the difference? It is reasonable to think that experiences in the past predispose some people to remain in depression after a tragedy whereas others recover, as discussed in Chapter 5.

Grief deserves attention because, as Freud put it, the person's sad feelings in ordinary depression are like those in grief. And indeed, his observation is consistent with the view of this book that sadness results from a negative comparison of actual and benchmark states. The benchmark event in the grief after the loss of a loved one is the wish that the loved one is still alive. Grief in the normal person also resembles depression in that the sadness is more prolonged than the normal person suffers after less catastrophic events. But the depressive may not recover from his grief at all, in which case we properly call it depression. Freud's analogy of depression with grief is otherwise not helpful, however, because it is the difference between depression and grief--as between depression and all other sadness from which people recover quickly--that is important, rather than any special similarity between depression and grief.

Physical condition can affect one's interpretation of present circumstances. We have all had the experience of suffering a setback when tired, but after a rest later realizing that we had overestimated the damage and the seriousness. And this is logical, because a tired person is less able to deal with a problem, and hence the setback is more serious and more negative relative to a desired or accustomed state of affairs than when one is fresh. Too much mental stimulation may have a similar effect by overloading and tiring the nervous system. (The role of too little stimulation in depression might be interesting, too.)

Summary

A crucial issue in depression is whether you interpret contemporary events accurately, or instead distort them in such manner as to make them seem more negative than they "really" are. We are here talking only of negatively-perceived current events.

The choice of whom to compare yourself with is one of the important ways that you structure your view of your life. Some choices lead to frequent negative comparisons and consequent unhappiness. This chapter discusses various mechanisms that can operate to cause one to view one's situation in a fashion that produces negative self-comparisons.

next: Good Mood: The New Psychology of Overcoming Depression Chapter 8