Free Manufacturing depression by Gary Greenberg Page A

no one could see but that must be lurking behind, and causing, what was visible.
     
    But every so often, one of Freud’s theories is inadvertently supported by science. The central idea of “Mourning and Melancholia”—that the disease consists of the loss of an illusion—is one instance. In the modern version of melancholia, the story that Iwould have told my doctors—the one in which I concluded that I had no business writing books, that my success was at least as much a fluke as the just reward for my effort—is not a clearheaded assessment, but the sign of pathology. Indeed, according to a theory developed in the 1960s, depressives make themselves sick by persistently and pervasively overestimating just how bad things are. This cognitive distortion is actually the pathogen. Something has gone haywire in a patient’s thinking—and, in later versions of this theory, in a patient’s brain—and caused him to become unduly negative. Cognitive-behavioral therapy, in which a therapist helps a patient correct this bleak outlook, is the cure.
    This theory, it turned out, could be tested. You could, for instance, break the unspoken rat-experimenter pact, the one that says you reward and punish a rat depending on what behavior you want to reinforce, and instead administer electrical shocks at random. And when you find that the rat eventually just curls up in a ball and stops eating, you can call that
learned helplessness
and extrapolate that this is what happens indepressed people—they get the idea that they can’t make things better and give up. Then you can offer to help them by showing them that they aren’t helpless, that they can improve their circumstances, that their lot is not as bad as they think. And you can turn to your Freudian friends and say that things just aren’t that complicated and dark. You don’t even need a human mind to get depressed, just an expectation that no matter what you do you are going to get hurt.
    But a funny thing happened to learned-helplessness theory. Cognitivists predicted that depressed people would be significantly more likely than non-depressed people to blame themselves when things go wrong. In 1979, a couple of psychologists, Lauren Alloy and Lyn Abramson, decided to check out this hypothesis. They set up a series of studies revolving around a green light and a button. In the first experiment, subjects were told to push the button and decide whether or not it made the green light come on, a condition that was controlled by the experimenter. Over and over again, the depressed people were better than their normal peers at assessing their role in the light’s status.
    Then Alloy and Abramson introduced money into the equation. They gave some subjects five dollars and told them that they’d lose money every time the green light failed to light. They gave other subjects no money but told them that they’d get money if the light came on. What they didn’t tell them was that the button was completely irrelevant and that everyone who started with money was going home broke, while everyone who started with nothing was going to win five bucks. Then they asked them to estimate the extent to which they were responsible for their fortunes—a task at which depressed people excelled. And when the experimenters started to give subjects control over the light, the nondepressed people turned out to think that they deserved to win but not to lose regardless of the actual facts. Depressed people, in the meantime, continued to be superior at figuring out their role in events. The experimenters concluded that “ depressed people are ‘sadder but wiser’ …Non-depressed people succumb to cognitive illusions that enable them to see both themselves and their environment with a rosy glow.”
    Alloy and Abramson noted that depressive realism, as this phenomenon came to be called—and, by the way, this work has never been refuted; cognitive theory, as we will see in later chapters, chugs