treatment drags action to the front of the line, then demonstrates with
indisputable numbers how much better you feel if you have a little fun.
COGNITIVE THERAPY. Behavioral treatment works if depressed people
try it, but as we’ve seen, it can require heroic efforts to get them up and
going. You can’t just talk them into action, because they’re sure it won’t
do any good. Cognitive therapyattacks that negative certainty by pointing
out how irrational thoughts lead to false conclusions. It works, but it still
requires a good deal of convincing to get depressed people to believe that
examining their thinking could possibly make them feel better.
Before any of the techniques can work, we somehow have to con-
vince depressed people to doubt their own perceptions. I’ve discovered
that tricks work far better than earnest explanations. Here’s one I’ve used.
You actually can try it at home.
Rachel slouches in the chair across from me, droning on about
how hopeless her life is. Unless you’re relentlessly optimistic,
working with depressed people can get very depressing. I turn
away from Rachel and start fumbling around in my desk drawer.
“Am I boring you?” she asks.
“No more than usual,” I say. Then I hold out a pair of
glasses with brown and smeary lenses. “Here, put these on.”
“Why?”
“To humor your crazy therapist,”
Rachel puts on the glasses because she knows I’ll hound
her unmercifully until she does. “Yuck,” she says, as she reaches
up to take them off.
“Keep them on for a minute,” I say. “I want you to see what
it’s like looking at the world through [expletive deleted]-colored
glasses.”
Rachel snatches off the glasses as if burned. “That’s what
you think I’m doing, right?”
“What do you think you’re doing?” I say, stroking my
beard.I’d love to say that in a moment of blinding insight Rachel recog-
nized the true nature of her depression, threw off her own metaphorical
The Psychology of Depression ❧ 189