The Sickness That Is Depression

A particularly insidious symptom, I think, is how depression creates a cycle of negative thinking. I learned about Seligman's model of depression and explanatory style recently and realized I've been doing exactly what the model describes. People who are depressed tend to interpret bad events as being permanent (stable), entirely their fault (internal), and applying to their entire life (general). Good events, conversely, are interpreted as unstable, external, and specific. So, if a depressed person fails a test, they're more likely to convince themselves that they're stupid, that their entire life is ruined, and that this is just the way they are. Similarly, if they pass, it's obviously only temporary and can't possibly be related to their ability at all. Of course, there's more nuance here in specific cases (sometimes bad things /are/ your fault, and sometimes good things /are/ random, for example), but the idea is that depressed individuals tend to use this kind of attribution, whereas non-depressed people reverse it.

Anyway, I'm not a cognitive behavioral therapist, nor have I seen one (I would like to, though), but I've been trying to fix my explanatory style. For example, I recently passed an interview round and immediately felt depressed instead of excited. When I read about negative attribution, I realized that I'd been doing exactly that: /obviously/ I am actually an imposter and I'll just be rejected next time, and of /course/ this good thing can't be permanent, and /obviously/ I only passed because of random chance.

Of course those things aren't (entirely) true! I tried hard and I think I decently know my stuff. I passed because I have a modicum of tech skills and I was able to demonstrate them. I do believe that a large part of interviewing is outside of our immediate control, but that means that even if I don't get the job then it doesn't help to dwell too much on failure anyway because I had little actual control over it.

So yeah, depression sucks, and when you're trapped in a cycle of negative thinking and emotions it can indeed seem impossible to get out of it. But cognition is a funny and powerful thing, and I absolutely believe (and the science seems to bear out, at least with CBT) that you can do some metacognition and change how you think. If you became depressed, you absolutely can become "undepressed", as it were. It's not easy, but at some point you have to try to claw your way out. Being aware of these types of thoughts and trying to challenge them is one way of making them stop. It helps to write them down, then write down all of the ways they don't make sense.

Maybe this helps someone else. At the very least, it helped me.