Dan Hartung (lake effect), whom I’ve considered one of my weblogging friends but whose views and mine have diverged dramatically since Sept. 11th (I think), understands cognitive therapy for depression quite well (“the key feature of cognitive therapy is the idea that you have an inner voice that’s thinking negative thoughts, and you need to “talk back” at yourself to combat them. Call it a rationalist’s version of the daily affirmation”) but then has an insight that there’s an analogy between the automatic negative thoughts of the depressive and “much of the anti-war journalism the anti-idiotarian warbloggers have been shredding with varied amounts of glee or exasperation.” He describes cognitive distortions like all-or-nothing thinking, overgeneralization, the mental filter, and disqualifying the positive, as characteristic of his ‘opponents’, and in the process indulges in all-or-nothing thinking, overgeneralization, selective filtering and disqualifying the positive about antiwar discourse.

But my major bone to pick with him about this simile between depressive cognition and antiwar thought is that he assumes, as do many, that because depressive thinking causes such distress, it’s necessarily wrong. In fact, there are serious arguments that depression may be an adaptive response to loss, setback or grief. Depressive thinking may actually be a more realistic appraisal than we can usually afford and hope to go on, and the organism’s shutdown in response to it may be a resource-conserving one in the service of survival. . In the modern world, with its rather superficial emphasis on productivity and function, we can have no truck with this response, so we jump to treat the depression. And, of course, we hasten to treat it if the pessimistic distortion is vastly out of proportion to the reality of the situation. But it isn’t necessarily out of proportion! It’s like the old line about bugs and insects — while all depressive thought is pessimistic, not all pessimism is pathological. These nuances should factor into anyone’s analogizing , it would seem to me.

Dan, I haven’t heard anything from you, as I was accustomed to hearing, since you and I began shooting our mouths off in divergent directions after Sept. 11th. I’m pretty sure my expressed sentiments place me among the cognitively distorted in your mind. That’s okay. But, particularly as both an opponent of the war effort and an experienced therapist, I think you’re wrong about whether “we” think “you” are the “sick ones,” as you suggest in your last line. In ministering to the depressed, you rarely get anywhere by a frontal assault on the contradictions in the depressive thinking, especially if you label the person or the thining as “sick.” Cognitive therapy works only for a subset, the most intellectualized subset, of the depressed, and at great cost of keeping one divided from oneself and some of one’s mental content. As the saying goes, you can never succeed arguing about politics or religion (and this is both to each of us, it would appear…). We only get somewhere when we recognize “sickness” as a different, not a priori better or worse, way of thinking about a situation, and engage in an open-minded exploration of whether it works or not. Anything less is just namecalling…