Patient readers with very, very good memories will remember that I have talked about this concept before. Usually, I phrase it as “would you rather be right, or happy?”, and that’s a phrase which, while elegant and efficient, makes no goddamned sense to anyone fortunate enough to live outside my skull.

And that’s most of you.

So tonight, I thought I’d try to illustrate my point with some examples.

First, a small example. Say a person thinks that absolutely nobody loves them. Then, they get incontrovertible evidence that someone absolutely does love them, and loves them a lot. How will they react?

If they are emotionally healthy, it will make them feel better.

But if depression has its thumb on the scale, what will happen is that the person will our a lot of energy into negating this attempt of life’s to suggest they are wrong. Depression is a lot like inertia. It resists change. In fact, it persists precisely because it gets so good at suppressing input that might undermine it, and it will use the most intellectually honest means to do so for it has no shame.

So what happens is that depression’s evil immune system will negate the input by hook or by crook. ^[1] The result of this attack is that instead of getting the full benefit of the positive emotional input, all the depressive gets is the cold comfort of knowing they were “right” that nobody loves them and that once more, they have triumphed over the forces of hope, love, and change.

That’s what I mean when I talk about being right versus being happy. If our imaginary depressive accepted the positive emotional input of someone demonstrating definite, sincere love for them, they would be a happier person who felt a lot better about themselves. And all it would cost them is admitting they were wrong and adjusting their world view accordingly. Seems like a small price to pay, doesn’t it?

I mean, if the choices are cake or death, who would choose death?

But as we know both from our own lives and the extensive research on the subject, people do not change their worldviews based on evidence very often. Our worldview is the rock upon which we build our sense of reality, and the human mind’s default setting is to maintain stability no matter what.

Ergo, changing our worldview is usually too big a change. The deeper the belief, the stronger the resistance, because the deeper the belief, the greater the number of other beliefs that would also have to change because they are built upon that original belief.

And this is depression’s greatest ally. It uses this resistance to remain dominant. It sinks its tentacles deep into the depressive’s world-view and insures that in order to truly attack it on a cognitive level, the depressive would have to admit that they have been dead wrong on a lot of things (and what’s worse, a lot of other people whom you hate were right about those things) and the self-stabilizing principle of the mind does the rest.

I consider myself lucky because while my depression has forced a lot of crazy beliefs on me due to its ability to cut me off from positive emotional input, I have never embraced a pessimistic or cynical world view. I have stubbornly refused to embrace the all too easy route of declaring the world to be a shitty place full of shitty people who have it out for me personally because I suck.

I have believed that I suck – I still do sometimes. But I have never believed that there was something fundamentally wrong with the world.

In fact, my attitude has always been one of a finely tuned and robust neutrality. Both pessimism and optimism make too many unsupportable assumptions that rest on the absurd notion that the universe has a fundamental disposition towards you as an individual and people in general.

That can’t be true, because the universe is not a sensate entity and therefore cannot have a disposition towards anything. It has no more of an opinion on what happens to you than a rock does.

It simply is.

So while I sometimes believe logically unsupportable things about myself, like that everyone hates me and wishes I would just go away for good and stop bothering them and being a burden on them, I at least leave the universe out of it.

This worldview inertia makes a purely cognitive approach to curing depression ineffective. The depressive knows, at least on some level, that their depressive beliefs are not backed up with a lot of evidence. So rejecting the wrong thoughts and replacing them with the good thoughts is not going to cut it alone.

In fact, it can leave the depressive confused and scared as they become trapped between what they feel is real and what they know is true.

Trust me, I have been there. That’s when you truly know you are crazy.

The real cure for depression does not, therefore, lie with attacking its underlying assumptions, except possibly at key moments when the depressive is receptive. Depressives believe what they believe because they have no choice. It’s what the bad chemicals in their mind force them to believe.

In other words, it is no mere error of thought.

Instead, depression has to be attacking the fundamental traumae that are causing the chemical imbalance in the first place. That’s what therapy is for. Therapy works. It works very slowly and follows a very crooked trajectory, but it works.

People don’t like to hear that. They want something faster and less invasive and uncomfortable. Therapy sheds light into the places people least want to see in themselves, and people are understandably leery of that.

But it’s the only thing that works.

At least until we invent a drug that induces catharsis by forcing suppressed memories to the surface and making you relive past traumas so you can get over them,

And even then, who would want to take it?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.