Julian Simon was depressed for 13 long years, living each day under a black cloud of sadness and pain. Simon consulted psychiatrists and psychologists of several schools, and read widely and critically in the psychological literature, desperate to find some therapy that would banish his depression.

Eventually he began to find help in the writings of cognitive therapists. Simon cured his own depression within weeks, and remained depression-free for the past 18 years before his death. He has made innovative contributions to the cognitive approach, resulting in his own distinctive technique, Self-Comparison Analysis.

In this book, Good Mood: The New Psychology of Overcoming Depression, the great scholar talks about what he learned from his own experiences with depression and how he overcame it by controlling his thinking. The book's accompanying software, the program Overcoming Depression, is based on advances in cognitive science and artificial intelligence. The great free-market economist and polymath, Julian Simon, passed away on February 8, 1998.

next: Epilogue: My Misery, My Cure and My Joy