I’ve referred to depression as a perception disorder, several times. I’d like to explore this in greater depth, as it affects how depressives relate to life. Note that I will be making some gross generalizations here — but even if these assertions don’t apply to everyone, experience has shown me that they’re valid observations nonetheless.

Depressives tend to take everything more seriously, than average folks. They also tend to take things personally.

This much is well-known. It lies at the heart of a school of therapy which is thought to be very effective for depression, known as “cognitive therapy.” “Very effective,” however, is a relative term; it’s successful for only about 60% of patients, and in the case of bipolar disorder, it’s much lower than that.

This compares favorably to antidepressant medications, which are anywhere from 60-70% effective. So I guess folks in the field of psychiatry are satisfied with these statistics.

But I’m not. I think it’s disgraceful.

Would you hire a mechanic who only repaired 60% of the cars he tried to fix? Would you believe a weatherman who was right only 60% of the time? Would you settle for 60% reliability, in any other area of life?

The fundamental problem with cognitive therapy, however, as with so many other treatments for depression, is that, while we know that it can help somewhat, we don’t precisely know how, and in the cases when it doesn’t help, we have no way to know why it failed.

Really, though, it comes down to what I said already: Depressives tend to take everything more seriously, than “average” folks. They also tend to take things personally. These are not things can easily be changed, if they can be changed at all.

What happens in patients treated with cognitive therapy, is that they are taught how to argue with themselves; they must constantly tell themselves that their own spontaneous thoughts are somehow “wrong” and that things are not always as they seem. This sets them up for failures when they discover that their original thinking was correct.

Here’s an example: Let’s say I’m going on a date, but she stands me up. I wonder why; being a depressive, perhaps my instinct tells me she didn’t really want to go on the date at all. Using cognitive therapy, I then tell myself that there are any number of reasons why she didn’t show up: traffic, car trouble, losing track of time, whatever. Perhaps this is good enough, for the moment. But later, I find out — perhaps from a third party — that my instinctive thinking had been true, all along. My date really did back out merely because she did not want to go out with me. It was personal, after all.

It only takes a few of these “failures” to make someone realize that cognitive therapy simply amounts to lying to oneself. That, of course, is precisely what it is! Only no one in “the business” will admit to it.

Ultimately, it’s not one’s thinking that needs to be changed. Rather, what needs to be changed is one’s basic, initial perceptions. It’s not enough to be able to wrestle intellectually with one’s automatic thinking; that can only go so far, and often can fall apart.

What really needs to happen, then, is to remove the sunglasses from one’s eyes. But cognitive therapy cannot do that — in spite of proponents’ claims that it can. Cognitive therapy is inherently flawed, and there’s no way to repair the flaw.

In any event, the manner in which one perceives things, is both deeply personal, and penetrates to all aspects of one’s life. Each and every waking moment, we view life through our own individual “perception filters.” It is not possible to go without one, as to do without it would require one to absorb each and every impulse that hits our senses, and analyze it. This is impossible to do. Instead, we selectively choose what we pay attention to, and we selectively choose what to heed, and what to dismiss.

In addition to being psychologically indispensible, our perceptive filters are also not sharable. We cannot explain ours to others, nor can they explain theirs, to us. As the physician and philosopher Karl Jaspers said, each human being is, indeed, a universe to his or her own, and can only share glimpses of that universe to others, not the universes themselves.

Thus, anyone pretending that he or she can show you how to alter your own perceptive filter, is at best tilting at windmills, and at worst, lying. No one can tell you what to do with your perceptive filter. You can change it on your own, however, without some outside information to go on, this is exceedingly hard. Unfortunately, no such information appears to exist.

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