Stinking Thinking

Are you feeling depressed? Youa re not alone: fifty million prescriptions were written in the UK last year for antidepressants such as Prozac and Seroxat, a rise of 7.5% on the year before. Psychologists remind us that depression is often caused by repressed anger or grief caused by what they call “stinking thinking”. Stinking thinking takes many forms, and if you’re feeling down today, it may be helpful to review some of them. Unfortunately, our culture promotes all of these: so try to recognise how we’re being influenced, and be kind to yourself.

Catastrophising

To catastrophise is to use a form of slippery slope argument that says, because something has happened, a much more disastrous result will inevitably follow. So my girlfriend dumps me, and I think “no-one will ever love me”. I do badly in one essay: “I will never crack this Philosophy exam”. There is a terrorist outrage in Kenya: “Africa can no longer defend itself”.

The most tragic form of this for a depressed person is to say: “my life is no longer worth living because the pain will never end”.

Negative thinking

Negativity is often linked to stressing and dwelling on negative feelings. All of us (as St Paul once helpfully reminded us in Romans 7) face a daily tension between destructive thoughts and helpful thoughts and feelings. The destructive ones include anger, jealousy, resentment, desire for vengeance, insecurity and lack of faith (I don’t mean this necessarily in a religious sense). The positive ones include forgiveness, appreciation, gratitude, self-worth, love and faith.

As virtue ethics helpfully reminds us, we can choose to build into these character traits which correspond to these positive feelings, and we do this by practising them.

One of the most helpful things to do if we’re feeling depressed is to keep a gratitude list which we add to every day. And if we want to practise something, a random act of kindness really does make us feel better! Click below to read more….

Poor self-image

What do you think when you look at yourself in the mirror? If your response is something like OMG or yuk or a feeling of despair, all these things are signs of a very poor self-image. But the airbrushed images of supposed perfection in our glossy mags and in TV celebrity culture encourage us to make a false comparison. Beauty really is an inward thing, a feature of the soul – again, Aristotle saw building the virtues as something that leads to a “great-souled person”. Believe it or not, some women really do like bald men or slightly overweight ones (I started losing my hair at 21!).

In fact it may well be that attractiveness has more to do with moral virtues than we recognise: the kind, considerate, generous and funny person (wittiness is a great Greek virtue) will often find themselves the most popular in your peer group.

If you are feeling depressed, this is completely understandable in our culture, and the pills really do help. I know, because I’ve suffered from depression all my life. So does talking to others, and so does trying to eliminate the illogical stinking thinking that is at the root of much of the problem. 

Image © Peter Baron Sunset on the Camargue 2013