This is an idea I have been pondering and refining for a long time now, and I think it is finally, finally to a point where I can share it.

It’s a theory related to depression, and in order to explain it, I will need to relate the rather depressing fact that got me on this train of thought in the first place.

Scientists did a study comparing people’s attitudes towards life and their mental health in general to how accurately the participants were able to answer simple factual questions about themselves like how tall they were, how much they weighed, and so on.

Now one would think that the optimist/healthy group would have an entirely accurate idea of themselves and the pessimist/depressive group would imagine themselves to be shorter, fatter, less good looking, and so on than the real facts would show.

But the truly enervating fact is that the optimist/healthy people consistently thought they were, to put it bluntly, better than they actually were, and it was the pessimist/depressive group who had the most accurate idea of themselves.

As it turns out, reality is depressing.

Now, how to interpret this stark little factoid? My first thought, besides, of course, “my God, that’s depressing”, was that depressives have a habit of using the truth to torture themselves over their perceived inadequacies, and have often memorized their vital statistics in order to better excoriate themselves at their leisure.

But that explanation is wildly inadequate. Clearly, something more was going on here, and it somehow conneced with the way depression operated.

Perhaps the problem was that somehow, a certain amount of positive self-delusion was actually absolutely necessary for the human psyche to operate in a healthy, positive, self-sustaining way, and a lack of that cushion against the bumps and blows of reality for our self-esteem was actually quite unnatural and dangerously maladaptive and unhealthy.

Maybe the lack of this buffer against the perfectly natural shocks and calamities is highly symptomatic of depression and low self-esteem, and perhaps even one of its root causes.

Without the shock-absorber of self-delusion, the ego soon shakes itself to pieces.

This would also be concordant with another factoid I picked up from somewhere, namely that healthy people have a relatively fixed, positive self-image which can only be changed by large and emotionally important events, whereas unhealthy, low self-esteem depressives have a wildly fluctuating and constantly re-evaluating self-image which nearly anything, no matter how minor, can influence.

And just like the more often you check your watch, the slower time seems to be going, the more often you re-check your self-worth, the lower it seems to be, setting up a pattern of continually lowering self-worth quite often found in depressives.

What leads to this disparity in ego inertia? Why can one person’s self-worth withstand any number of things that would make a depressive person’s sense of self-worth plummet like bird shot from the sky?

I am not sure. Certainly, the most basic answer is that normal, healthy people must have some sort of mechanism like an immune system which protects their self-worth from outside influences, blocking and defusing things that might upset it, and correcting the damage fast enough when it does happen so that the net effect is one of near-constant high self worth.

In depressive, said system is severely compromised or possibly even nonexistent, and it is therefore no surprise that the patient rapidly becomes very ill.

What causes this mental immune deficiency? From the depressive’s point of view, the answer might seem to be “life itself” or “the fact I suck”, but that does not really answer the question. Another person in the same circumstances might well have a wonderful opinion of themselves and a clean bill of mental health. What makes the difference?

To continue the immune system metaphor, perhaps the problem is that events in the depressive’s childhood damaged their mental immune system badly enough that it opened the door to more damage to their self-worth and thus began a terrible cycle of increasingly compromised psychological function which leads, finally, to depression, low self-esteem, impair cognition, and all the rest.

If that is the case, then it at least in part validates the traditional therapeutic approach of searching for these original traumas and attempting to repair them in order to bring the whole psyche back into health.

The problem is that the broken mental immune system has let in countless other trauma since then, and addressing them all would take several more lifetimes than any of us get.

Modern SSRI-based antidepressants, on the other hand, by suppressing some of the symptoms, might just artificially restore the mind to the state of health where the mind can begin to heal that long term damage, without the stress of the ongoing depression.

But that would be treating the symptoms more than treating the disease.

The answer, obviously, is exactly what everyone recommends these days : treatment plus medication. Not a groundbreaking result, but still interesting.

Perhaps a system of practical training in ego defense could be added to the cognitive portion of more traditional therapies in order to help repair this vital psychological defense mechanism and stop the damage from getting worse.

There must be a way to sure the undefended ego.

At least, I sincerely hope there is.