Posted by SLS on November 26, 2006, at 16:09:10
In reply to Re: It's Treatable. No, it's not., posted by linkadge on November 26, 2006, at 13:54:11
> I don't see how happiness and depression can coexist, unless if you consider mood swings.
I really can't speak for anyone but for myself. Depression is a beast of many faces, and I don't know if it is possible to be happy when staring into all of them.
I believe that happiness is the result of the way one thinks rather than the way one feels. Certainly, depression produces a force that tries to warp the way one thinks. This is where I think CBT can act as a coping tool. It can help with the recognition of, and compensation for, the cognitive distortions that are produced in the depressive state.
It is not an easy trick to pull off. However, the key is to make it a habit. I only wish that I could get myself to brush my teeth with such regularity.
Before I knew that my depression was biological, I was unhappy and suicidal. Once I understood that the biological feelings of depression were beyond my control and independent of thought, I was able to learn how to think happy and feel terrible. I decided long ago that it was better to be happy and miserable than to be unhappy and miserable.
What helped me was to conceptualize biological depression as a lack of reward and/or a preponderance of punishment. Before I knew there was such a thing as CBT, I was employing what I had learned about behaviorism in my college psychology 101 class regarding classical conditioning and operant learning to create a my own model of depression. It provided me with a conceptualization that allowed me to separate cognition from affect. I put this together and began to work with it over 20 years ago. It has been so long, that I don't realize when I do it anymore. Either it has become an integral part of my being, or I have just become less focused on performing the work, but I don't really think about it anymore.
- Scott
poster:SLS
thread:706067
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20061123/msgs/707481.html