What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [101]
The people in both groups were asked to judge, as accurately as they could, how much control they had. Depressed people were very accurate. When they had control, they assessed it accurately, and when they did not have control, they said so. The nondepressed people astounded Alloy and Abramson: These subjects were accurate when they had control, but when they were helpless, they were undeterred—they still judged that they had a great deal of control. The depressed people knew the truth. The nondepressed people had benign illusions that they were not helpless when they actually were.
Alloy and Abramson wondered if maybe lights and button pushing did not matter enough, so they added money: When the light went on, the participants won money; when the light did not go on, they lost money. But the benign illusions of nondepressed people did not go away; in fact, they increased. Under one condition, where everyone had some control, the task was rigged so that everyone lost money. Here, nondepressed people said they had less control than they actually had. When the task was rigged so that everyone won money, nondepressed people said they had more control than they actually had. Depressed people, on the other hand, were rock solid, accurate whether they won or lost.
Supporting evidence confirms that depressed people are accurate judges of how much skill they have, whereas nondepressed people think they are much more skillful than others judge them to be (80 percent of American men think they are in the top half of social skills). Nondepressed people remember more good events than actually happened, and they forget the bad events. Depressed people are accurate about both. Nondepressed people believe that if it was a success, they did it, it is going to last, and, moreover, that they are good at everything; but if it was a failure, someone did it to them, it is going away quickly, and it was just this one little thing. Depressed people are evenhanded about success and failure. “Success has a thousand fathers, and failure is an orphan” is only true of the beliefs of nondepressives. In a follow-up study, Alloy found that nondepressed people who are realists go on to become depressed at a higher rate than nondepressed people who have these illusions of control.1 Realism doesn’t just coexist with depression, it is a risk factor for depression, just as smoking is a risk factor for lung cancer.
It is a disturbing idea that depressed people see reality correctly while nondepressed people distort reality in a self-serving way. As a therapist I was trained to believe that it is my job to help a depressed patient to both feel happier and see the world more clearly. I am supposed to be the agent of happiness as well as the agent of truth. But maybe truth and happiness antagonize each other. Perhaps what we have considered good therapy for a depressed patient merely nurtures benign illusions, making the patient think that her world is better than it actually is.
This possibility is more than just disturbing when you flesh it out. It is downright subverting of one of our most cherished beliefs about therapy: that the therapist is the agent of both reality and health. For what other problems does good mental health depend on deluding oneself? For what other problems does cure depend on nurturing illusions rather than facing facts? Maybe the tactics that relieve a problem and the truth about the problem are not the same.
Nowhere is the antagonism between the tactics of recovery and the truth better seen than in problems of substance abuse. This chapter is about alcohol. I will not discuss other recreational drugs or cigarettes at any length, but all of what I have to say applies to the abuse of these substances as well.
Alcohol and Alcoholism
There is a disease called alcoholism.
An alcoholic is powerless before this illness.
Alcoholism is a physical addiction.
Alcoholism