The Rewards of Depression

Do you really want to shake off your depression? Don't answer too fast, and don't be too sure. It is quite common that people get enough benefits from their depressions so that they prefer remaining depressed--despite all its unpleasantness--to being undepressed. So they stay depressed.

At first this assertion seems nonsensical. Doesn't everyone want to be happy rather than sad? But the word "want" is a tricky one, because a person can have more than one "want" at a given moment. By analogy, consider that you may "want" a piece of chocolate, but you may also "want" not to ingest additional calories or get fat. The resultant of these two forces may be that you do not eat the cake even though you "want" it, or you may eat it even though you want not to get fat.

There are two kinds of conflicting wants that may be involved in depression: other wants which conflict with being free of depress, and the wish to stay depressed for its own sake. Here are a few examples of "wants" that may keep you depressed: (1)

1) You may know that overwork causes you to be depressed, but you may want the fruits of the work sufficiently badly so that you overwork anyway. This is little different than the situation of the person who risks heart attack by working too hard.

2) You may have the "magical" belief that if you punish yourself for your misdeeds by being sad, an authority (which may be God) will take note of your self-punishment and therefore refrain from punishing you further. We see this in children who, following misbehavior, put on a sad and apologetic face and thereby effectively avoid punishment. This connection may continue to exist within the adult's mind, even though it no longer works. A person who violates a legal or moral code may punish himself with sadness in the hope that the law or his peers or God will thereby be foreclosed from punishing him in an even worse manner. Hence he chooses to remain depressed.

3) "Experienced" depressives -- that is, people who suffer depression from time to time -- sometimes use depression as an excuse not to meet demands and do unpleasant chores.

4) An important "benefit" of depression is that you can feel sorry for yourself because you are so miserable. Self-pity and depression are almost inseparable, wrapped up with each other like climbing vines. Some writers have even believed that self- pity is the origin of depression.

At the root of the adult depression of a child whose parents die may lie this mechanism involving self-pity: At the time of the death, other members of the family express their sorrow and pity for the child, together with their love for the child. This is relatively pleasant for the bereaved child, and it is the best substitute for the parent's love. It would be logical for a child to extend the period of seeming depressed in order to continue eliciting this expressed pity and love by others. And this pattern of depression to elicit pity and love may continue through the person's life--perhaps most strongly for a person who does not get enough of this pity and sorrow to surfeit her at the time of bereavement.

Benefits of Self-Pity

Self-pity is a pleasant substitute for pity from others. In turn another person feeling pity for you is pleasant because it is associated with the other person caring about you, and that caring is associated with loving you. Any lack of love of others may be the proximate cause of sadness, because of the close association between lack of parental love and neg-comps. (Notice how a parent expressing love for a child can banish a child's sadness. And a depressed adult is often conscious of the desire that a friend or spouse give comfort in the form of expressing sorrow.)

There is sound inner logic, then, in remaining depressed so that you can give yourself a reasonable substitute for the love of others that you crave. And this may act as a powerful attraction toward depression and a formidable obstacle to forsaking depression for happiness.

In this respect depression is similar to hypochondria, which elicits sympathy from others and provides an excuse not to exert oneself. Just as with hypochondria, the benefits of depression may seem greater than the costs.

The concept of self-comparisons is especially fruitful in analyzing self-pity. Consider these examples of external events upon which people fix their thoughts when they are in a self- pitying frame of mind:

Homely Sally pities herself because she does not have the advantages that come with being better looking; men therefore don't appreciate her other virtues, she tells herself. Unsuccessful poet Paul pities himself because magazines never publish his poetry, though they publish others' poems that are nowhere near as good as those he writes. Five-foot-seven-inch Calvin pities himself because, though he was a hot-shot basketball player in high school, no college would give him a scholarship due to his height, and he therefore never went on with his studies. Mother Tamara pities herself because two of her five children died.

Earlier I said that people enjoy self-pity. They get so much benefit from it that they are unwilling to stop feeling sorry for themselves even if the price of the self-pity is continued depression. But why should this be? What is there so pleasant in the nature of the examples given above that would make the thought desirable? Why would anyone want to go on pitying herself for losing two children to death, or because his poetry doesn't get published? We need an explanation in terms of neg-comps.

The answer to this riddle is that in their self-pity people also make a positive self-comparison which gives them gratification. Poet Paul tells himself, while he is feeling sorry for himself, that he really is a better poet than many of those who do get their poetry published; that self-praise makes him feel good. At the same time, the thought that he is not getting what he deserves -- a negative self-comparison, please notice -- is making him feel sad. He flips back and forth from one thought and feeling to the other, getting pleasure from the self-praise and the positive self-comparison, and then getting sadness from the negative self-comparison.