Autoconditioning E-Book

Hornell Hart

• Herausgeber: Stargatebook
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

This book represents a new breakthrough in the Science of Psychology and shows you how to give your life new meaning and purpose, and how to live consistently on a plane of confidence, satisfaction, and achievement.

This is a book offering a simple and workable method of overcoming emotional difficulties, easily applied and readily learned.
Millions of people will find it extremely valuable and useful.

Leseprobe

AUTOCONDITIONING

THE NEW WAY TO A SUCCESSFUL LIFE

HORNELL HART, Ph.D.

Department of Sociology DUKE UNIVERSITY

Edition 2024 by Stargatebook

All rights reserved

CONTENTS

BOOK I. - Today, Science Can Teach You to Be Happy

CHAPTER 1 - A New Discovery About How to Achieve Happiness

CHAPTER 2 - How Lives Have Been Transformed by Autoconditioning

CHAPTER 3 -  The Formula: the Four Don'ts and the Three Do's

BOOK II. - How Autoconditioning Works

CHAPTER - 4. How to Autocondition Yourself

CHAPTER - 5. Speeding Up Your Autoconditioning

BOOK lII. - Solving Your Problems with Autoconditioning

CHAPTER 6 - How to Make Decisions

CHAPTER 7 - How to Conquer Depression

CHAPTER 8 - Getting Along with Others

CHAPTER 9 -  How to Sleep Soundly-and How to Stay Awake

CHAPTER 10 -  Winning Success on the Job

CHAPTER 11 - New Roads to Success in Courtship

CHAPTER 12 - How to Make Your Marriage Work

CHAPTER 13 - Triumphing over Bereavement

CHAPTER 14 - How Autoconditioning Can Rid Your Life of Tension

CHAPTER 15 - Some Needed Safeguards in Autoconditioning

AUTOCONDITIONING

The New Way to a Successful Life

Courage, Vital Energy, Successful Friendliness: Would You Like Your Life to Be Filled by These?

• You can learn to live continually with cheerful courage. If that statement is true, it is of momentous significance for the great majority of intelligent and normal human beings. If you can learn to become courageous, friendly, and clear-headed, and to be that way consistently, then that fact is one of the most important discoveries you can make. If you can learn to have access, at times of need, to fresh reservoirs of personal energy, that is a further fact you need to make your own.

That these things are true is set forth in this book. Facts are presented - not dogmatic assertions, not wishful thinking. This book presents the conclusions of systematic scientific research at one of America's leading universities.

• Autoconditioning offers YOU this new way to successful living

The name given to this life-changing discovery is autoconditioning. In the next few pages, you will be told briefly what autoconditioning is. But first let us take a look at some illustrations of how it works.

• Take cases like these

Herb Slade lived a life of quiet desperation. His dreams of becoming the great biologist who would find the cure for cancer collapsed when his father was killed and his mother was crippled in an auto accident, and he quit college to support the family. An aggressive woman married him and moved into his mother's home. Wrangling was damaging to the children's lives. Then Herb discovered that, by using autoconditioning, he could come right up out of his feelings of despair and could begin to face life with cheerful courage. He found that he could solve his family problems progressively by grappling courageously, cooperating creatively, and adventuring spiritually. He found that he could get "hunches-to-order" on the best ways to solve his problems.

Or consider the case of Edna, who had fallen in love with Spencer when they worked together in the office of a great corporation. After marriage, she had fed him courage when he lost his job in the big merger. She had given her best years to helping him succeed, and to rearing his three children. Then he demanded a divorce so he could marry his secretary. Edna felt as if the sky had come crashing down on her, scattering her life in ruins around her. But one of her friends had come through divorce with magnificent courage. The friend told her that this was a result of autoconditioning. Edna set to work, at first desperately, to master the technique. She discovered that she didn't have to be desperate. She found an amazing source of courage and fresh hope. She took a job and succeeded at it splendidly. She won the deep admiration and loyalty of her children. Finally, she realized that her divorce had been the entry into a wider phase of life, which she might have missed if she had not learned to grapple courageously with apparent disaster.

Six Kinds of Help You Can Get from Autoconditioning

Curing emotional depression is only one of many different uses in which autoconditioning serves vital needs. Starting with the courage-gaining purpose, here are six practical problems - some of which may be your problems:

1. Gaining new courage. Many people who used to plunge often into the "Downhearted," "Discouraged," "Despairing" range of the Mood-Meter, which is used in autoconditioning, have learned to recondition themselves so that they live fairly consistently in the "Purposeful" to "Joyful" range. If a person who has mastered autoconditioning finds himself beginning to slip into depression, actual tests show that about a quarter of an hour of autoconditioning puts him back between "Cheerful" and "Encouraged" on the Mood-Meter.

2. Releasing new reserves of energy. Many people who used to find themselves getting tired, bored, and sleepy have discovered that autoconditioning can be used to restore vigor, alertness, enthusiasm, and cheerfulness. It is not a substitute for sleep, nor for taking needed rest. But it is a way of using one's energy reserves with high efficiency - turning them on readily in times of need, and then replenishing them with deep sleep when the time for rest arrives.

3. Raising your working efficiency. Obviously, if you can keep on working with genuine vim and vigor through that last hour or two, which perhaps used to be largely wasted, your output on the job is likely to go up. And also, if you learn to apply autoconditioning to the improvement of your attitudes toward your boss, or your fellow-worker, or your client, your achievements will increase.

4. Getting rid of bad habits. Some people who used to procrastinate, lie awake at night, worry, smoke too much, eat too much fattening food-or do other things which, at their best moments, they knew they would be better off without, have learned that autoconditioning gives new and surprising self-control.

5. Getting rid of useless pain. Obstetricians and dentists are increasingly using autoconditioning methods to take away the needless and damaging pains of childbirth and tooth-drilling or extraction. Experts warn that pain may sometimes be a needed danger signal. But when you have taken pain's warning, and used the wise remedies, why go on suffering needlessly?

6. Being a better friend. Successful friendship is largely a matter of attitudes. Being wanted as a marriage partner; being successful as a husband, wife, or parent; being elected to honored and useful office; and just being the friendly kind of person wanted as a guest and who succeeds as a host - such things depend on one's attitudes. Almost anyone can correct his own attitudes by autoconditioning.

What Autoconditioning Is Not

• It is not a magical cure-all

Many people would like to find some magic word or magic act to help them instantly cure all their troubles and achieve all their wishes. Autoconditioning is not that sort of thing. If you wanted to become a good swimmer, or a good skier - or even a good automobile driver - you would recognize that you would have to practice to win that skill. Still more so if you wanted to learn to fly, or to play the violin or the saxophone, or to write shorthand. Indeed, all of us spend a good many months and even years just learning to read.

When such skills are acquired, they may be richly rewarding. Mastery of autoconditioning is even more rewarding. It is a new way to successful living. And, like any other skill that is worth having, you must work at it before you can become proficient. Quite likely you will get some highly encouraging results the first time you try it - great numbers of people have. And the results of full mastery are certainly worth working for. Success in joyous living - success as a husband and wife, or success in search for a life partner if you are not yet married, success as a friend, success in winning self-respect and the respect of others - such things are beyond price. And these are goals that can progressively be achieved by any normal and intelligent person willing to work at it.

• Autoconditioning is not a substitute for psychiatry

This new skill in successful living is available to the 95 per cent of intelligent people who are normal mentally. People who are mentally ill need psychiatrists. But the great majority of us, who would never think of going to a "brain-doctor," feel the need of learning how to live more successfully. We need courage. We need to learn how to control our tempers. We need to learn how to go to sleep easily and how to sleep deeply through the night. How to get along better with the people we live with and work with. How to win flashes of inspiration when we need them Such things as these can be won by those who master autoconditioning. This new scientific knowledge can supplement psychiatry, and psychiatry can supplement autoconditioning. But neither is a substitute for the other.

• Autoconditioning is not a substitute for religion 

If you are an active member of a church or synagogue, you need have no fear that autoconditioning will become a rival of your religious faith. Religion and autoconditioning supplement each other wonderfully. Every believer in the religious way of life has realized often how hard it is to live up to the ideals called for by that faith. The Bible says: "Be of good courage!" "Love your enemies!" "Sin not!" "Be ye therefore perfect!" Such injunctions are beyond the reach of most of us a good deal of the time. But those who master autoconditioning have a new technique for bringing their own unconscious minds into line with their own best ideals. You can be a better member of your church or synagogue if you win mastery over autoconditioning.

But suppose you have no religious faith. To you, then, autoconditioning can be of immense help in learning more about the real meaning of life. It can help you in finding what you can believe in, and then living up to the best belief you can find.

• Autoconditioning is a new breakthrough in psychological science

 Many do-it-yourself books in applied psychology have been put together out of a few bright ideas and a lot of wishful thinking. Autoconditioning is not one of those superficial fads, It is the outgrowth of a long series of scientific researches and experiments, coming out of the centuries, and reaching a climax in the experimental work at Duke University.

The discovery of atomic energy was a breakthrough in the science of physics. The discovery of mutations by Hugo De Vries was a breakthrough in biological science. The discovery of autoconditioning is a breakthrough in psychological science. Revolutionary changes in education, in personal counseling, in applied religion, and in business are being opened up by this new breakthrough in psychological research.

What Can Autoconditioning Do for You As a Person?

• Would you like to be courageous?

None of us wants to be a coward. None of us wants to be tortured continually by fear, worry, and anxiety. None of us wants to have to endure the contempt of others - and of oneself -because one dares not meet bravely the dangers and the hardships of life.

What is it that makes people cowardly? You can try as hard as you like with your conscious mind to be brave, and still you can be the victim of fear, worry, and even cowardice. The problem is, how to bring your unconscious mind into line with your own deep wish to be courageous. Autoconditioning is a technique that makes it possible for you to bring your own unconscious mind into line with your own highest aspirations to live bravely.

• Would you like to be alert?

Are you troubled sometimes by fatigue and sleepiness when you have a job that needs to be done? Do you find your thoughts wandering, your eyelids drooping, and your head sagging forward when you ought to be wide awake, alert, energetic, and interested? Most people do, at times that is, until they have mastered autoconditioning. One of the seemingly miraculous results even beginners in autoconditioning can achieve is to come up within ten minutes out of a state of weariness and sleepy, wandering attention, into the wide-awake, interested state in which they can clean up swiftly the work that has to be done.

• Would you like to go to sleep quickly and soundly, without drugs?

Insomnia is one of the great enemies of healthy living. Millions of Americans toss in their beds in futile worry and distress because they cannot go to sleep or stay asleep when they desperately need their rest. Autoconditioning is one of the most effective and healthy methods of going to sleep almost instantly, and of getting deep rest and refreshment night after night.

• Would you like to be more successful as a friend, comrade, and working partner?

Almost everybody has at times suffered from quarrels, or at least from friction, with members of his family, with his teammates in daily work, and with his other associates. Misunderstandings, antagonism, resentment, jealousy - such things too often destroy family life, throw sand into the gears of industry, and hold ambitious people back from promotions and from the achievements to which they aspire.

If you have difficulty at times in getting along with other people, you will find that you can analyze those difficulties into unsound ways of reacting. Most people, if they have not mastered autoconditioning, are apt to act at times on impulse, with irritation, anger, resentment, or other destructive social attitudes. Usually, they don't want to react that way. They would rather be friendly and cooperative. But they say that they can't control their tempers, or that people are just too irritating. Now autoconditioning can give you a way of changing your own reaction patterns.

• Is your marriage ideally happy?

Most marriages are not. About one of four marriages ends in divorce. Vast numbers of husbands and wives who stick it out without divorce, suffer from frequent quarrels or from almost constant bickering. Many such couples are trying to stay married for the sake of their young ones. If such couples go on quarreling in the presence of their children, they are doing these young personalities life-long damage.

If your marriage is far from perfect, and you would like to save it and make it a joyous life-partnership, you need to acquaint yourself with the ways autoconditioning can give you power to solve your family problems. Look at Chapter 12 on "How to Make Your Marriage Work."

Or, if you are not yet married, look at Chapter 11 on "New Roads to Success in Courtship." Mary Dane's case is one example of the kind of help autoconditioning can give. She had been brought up strictly. Her mother had taught her that no really nice man kisses a girl until he asks her to marry him. She let Don take her to a drive-in theater. Right in the middle of an intense love scene in the movie, Don seized her and began caressing her in a way she had never dreamed any decent person would think of. He wouldn't stop until she yelled for help. As soon as she got home she resolved: "If men are such beasts,

I don't want ever to have anything more to do with them!" Her closest girlfriend finally convinced her that her attitudes toward sex were basically unhealthy. Then Mary burst out: "Well, how can I change my attitude toward men? I don't want to be an old maid! And really, I'm no iceberg either! What can I do about it?"

"Well," queried her friend, "have you ever heard about autoconditioning?"

Mary never had. But she did consent to read about it, and she found that autoconditioning opens up "New Roads to Success in Courtship." With the help of her friend, she conditioned herself to take a new and far more wholesome attitude toward men. Within a month she had a new boyfriend and was having some wonderful times with him. She found that he wanted to make love too, but instead of getting angry and hurt about it, she reacted in the self-respecting and understanding way she had pre-set in her own unconscious mind by means of autoconditioning. From that point onward, Mary Dane progressed smoothly and surprisingly rapidly into a joyous marriage.

• Would you like to have hunches-to-order?

Most of us have flashes of inspiration. We suddenly get a bright idea that proves to be exceedingly stimulating and useful.

But do you have long periods when you need very much to have bright ideas but when you don't seem to be able to get any? Do you wish, sometimes, that you could turn on the hunch-power whenever you need it? Do you wish that you could always get the clear flashes of insight, the surges of power and enthusiasm which at your best moments have carried you forward to success?

If your answer to such questions is "Yes," take a look at Chapter 6, on "How to Make Decisions." You will find there a set of instructions telling you how to open the doors of inspiration when you need to get a flood of light on your problems and when you need to feel a fresh surge of courage and inspiration.

Autoconditioning Can Bring You Success In Your Vocation

• Success on the job

Most of us who work to earn a living find that we are competing with other people. Like it or not, the question of whether you get promoted will depend to a very great extent on how your achievements rate as compared with those other people who might be promoted to that job you would like. Or, if your success depends upon customers, clients, patients, or parishioners, you must inevitably compete with others whose services are offered to those same people.

Now what is it that decides whether you will succeed or fail in this competition? The answers to three questions will determine to a very great extent whether you succeed, stagnate, or fail:

1. How much genuine and creative enthusiasm do you give to your work?

2. How successfully can you meet and solve the problems that keep confronting you in your daily job?

3. How good a friend and partner are you with the people who must be your teammates if your work is to be a success?

Every ambitious person wants to make his working life answer those three questions in the way that leads to top-notch achievement. But you may find that your daily actions fail quite often to live up to your own best ideals. Something blocks you. Something holds you back. Something makes you give a wrong reaction at a time when only the right reaction will lead to success.

The right answers to those three questions depend to a very great extent on your unconscious attitudes. Down in your inner receptive mind are reaction impulses that go off automatically and unthinkingly at times of crisis. But you can change those reaction patterns. That is what autoconditioning is for.

Take, for example, the case of Stanley Sidney. After five years of terribly slow progress in his job, and of persistent prodding by his wife, he was on the verge of quitting, and taking a chance on finding a better opening in a far-off city. But he heard a broadcast about winning success on the job by autoconditioning. It suddenly struck him: "Maybe the trouble is really with me, not with my boss!" He decided to look into autoconditioning further before he took the leap out of his job.

What Stanley learned made a turning-point in his whole career. When he studied his behavior in the light of what he read about autoconditioning, he began to realize that promotion in business depends first and foremost on the employee developing the attitudes that make him a creative teammate on the job. Suddenly he became aware that he himself reacted wrongly to criticism, that he had been stubborn and uncooperative, and that he had failed to develop the outgoing friendliness so important in good working relations.

Then he made a further discovery. He could actually alter these destructive attitudes by means of brief sessions of autoconditioning. He began remaking his own personality with the aid of this powerful new technique.

Within three months, channels of promotion opened up ahead of him. He got the substantial increase in salary needed to take the pressure off at home, to give him new confidence and enthusiasm.

The upsurge in success on the job that came to Stanley is open to anyone who learns to make full use of autoconditioning.

Master this technique, and you can increase your competitive efficiency to a startling degree. Many people have found that they can up their effectiveness as much as 75 per cent by right uses of autoconditioning. Your whole future is likely to depend upon your achieving some such improvement in your working efficiency.

Becoming a New Person

These blue pages have been giving a few advance glimpses of the kinds of transformation autoconditioning can achieve. We have looked at one detail after another, from one angle after another. But the person who masters autoconditioning, and who uses it systematically in daily living, soon realizes that the result is not a mere patching of this or that detail. He comes to a realization that actually he has remade his personality. He is a new kind of person.

When you get to the point where you never become discouraged, when you build into your unconscious mind such attitudes that you practically never get angry, when you acquire such mastery over your own sleep habits and your energy reserves that you can always triumph over fatigue, and when you learn that practically any bad habit marring your personality can be eradicated by systematic use of autoconditioning, then you find that a new level of joyous and successful life is possible for you.

But autoconditioning is now growing into something much more than the remaking of individual personalities. When two, or three, or 20, or 100 people have thus remade their personalities, and when they begin to work together in the partnerships of daily life, then the results begin to transform social groups, and to transform communities. Families which had often been miserable, through bickering and misunderstanding, blossom into a new and joyous level of shared love. Business establishments, when they become permeated by transformed personalities, experience a new level of success and a new level of joyously shared work.

Thus, by the mastery of ourselves through the power of autoconditioning, we can begin to realize and to achieve high joy in life.

BOOK I. - Today, Science Can Teach You to Be Happy

CHAPTER 1 - A New Discovery About How to Achieve Happiness

• Can science teach people to be happy?

Can science teach people happiness? Normal people, that is-not psychopaths. Nine out of ten normal people get depressed at least occasionally. Half of the population suffers painful depressions every week or two. Depressions, even in normal people, can develop into a serious disease - sometimes ending in suicide.

• Our machine civilization-and happiness

Did it ever occur to you that our civilization bends most of its energies to the attempt to get rid of misery and to create happiness? Industry, agriculture, the arts, medical science, and religion all toil strenuously, often heroically, in trying to avert hunger, cold, heat, disease, loneliness, death, and other sources of human pain. They work to cultivate the thrills and comforts of the human body, mind, and spirit-delicious food, sweet music, laughter, and the sense of achievement. In our vast industries and endeavors to promote these ends, our engineers and scientists have invented instruments to measure such things as speed, temperature, money cost, and even the loudness of the laughter of an audience. Our technologists have worked hard to measure the means by which pain can be averted and joy created.

But up till now we have lacked accurate and ready instruments to measure the end-results of human struggle - namely, the happiness or unhappiness of consumers and producers.

• The invention of a happiness-meter

For some decades past, scientists at the University of Chicago, at Columbia University, and at other research centers have been inventing scales to measure happiness. At Duke University this problem has been a subject of investigation for more than 15 years. Finally, this research came to a climax in a series of hundreds of experiments, out of which emerged a new discovery.

The discovery has two basic aspects. First, it presents a simple and swift method for measuring the degree of happiness or unhappiness of a person at a given moment. This part of the discovery may be likened to the invention of the fever thermometer, the electrocardiograph, or the technique for measuring blood pressure. The surge and ebb of happiness and unhappiness are as much a symptom of a person's psychological and social health as the rise and fall of temperature and blood pressure and the changes in the pattern of heartbeat are symptoms of the health or disease of the body.

How the Duke Mood-Meter is better

The tests for measuring happiness which had been developed at other research centers had been cumbersome to give, and they had to be scored by experts. The "Mood-Meter," which has been perfected at Duke University, can be taken by oneself, and scored by oneself, within two minutes. It gives such reliable and valid results that the one who takes it for several days produces a "fever-chart" of his own mood fluctuations. A copy of this Mood-Meter is printed on Page 5, with instructions for using it to measure your own ups and downs in happiness and unhappiness.

Changing Your Moods from Unhappy to Happy

The second part of the discovery that has been made at Duke is a process whereby changes can be achieved in the attitudes which make people happy or unhappy. It has been found that whether a person is joyful or miserable depends not merely or even mostly on what happens to him, but rather on the attitudes he takes.

For example, a rattlesnake, if we met one on a wild mountainside, would be for most of us a very menacing stimulus. Many people would shriek with fear or freeze with terror if they met such a snake in the open. Yet a naturalist might have a surge of joy at seeing a rattler. And a collector for a zoo might feel a thrill when he thought of the cash which he would get by selling the reptile.

• Can you turn "rattlesnakes" into assets?

But how can the common garden-variety of person achieve the attitudes which turn fear and despair into courage and joy when he meets the rattlesnakes, the bludgeonings of fate, the pummelings of outrageous fortune? That such changes can actually be achieved by autoconditioning is the very core of the discovery which has been made at Duke University. Perhaps the best way to demonstrate this achievement is to sketch briefly two outstanding cases.

The Case of the Once Fearful but Now Joyous Bride

Before Mary Dolan started autoconditioning, she recorded Mood-Meter reactions such as can be seen at the left side of her chart. Four times during the preliminary period from July 21 to 26, Mary's Mood-Meter line plunged down below zero - once to only the "Frustrated" level, but three other times to the "Discouraged-Disgusted" zone. Then, after two weeks of autoconditioning, she began to register consistently in the range between "Encouraged" and "Joyful," as shown in the right-hand half of her chart.

• Why Mary got depressed

What were the factors in Mary Dolan's life which were sending her plunging down into the depths of disillusionment, discouragement, and depression? As she herself explained it, there were four major causes.

Mary (who was a good Catholic) was about to marry a young man who was a Protestant. They were very much in love. He was a splendid young businessman. He had agreed fully to the conditions required by the Catholic church for giving its sanction to the marriage. But the families on both sides were deeply disturbed at the idea of their children marrying across the religious boundary, and grief was being stirred up, over and over again, by problems related to the wedding.

Mary's second cause for depression was more long-standing. Ever since her early childhood, her mother and father constantly had been quarrelling. The home atmosphere had alternated from being extremely chilly to being violently hot with hate.

Third, Mary had a much-loved brother who had been training to be a military aviator. Just at the peak of the difficulty about the wedding, she heard from him that he had failed an examination and could not be an army flier.

In addition to those three sources of grief, Mary was taking work in summer school which had discouraged her deeply. To receive her A.B. Degree, she had to get at least a B in a course in organic chemistry, and she was stumped by some of the experiments.

•She learned the formula

At that stage, right in the midst of her series of plunges into depression, she was introduced to "the Four Don'ts and the Three Do's." (This, you will note, is the subject of Chapter 3.) The lecture which presented these seven rules gave her quite a lift. She resolved to grapple with her problems with real courage and faith.

• By autoconditioning, Mary solved her problems

But she met a basic difficulty. She found that these good resolutions disappeared quite rapidly when her problems reared their heads again. She had planned to be married in a Catholic church, but then she got a letter stating that if the wedding were held there her fiancé's family would not attend. At once, Mary's new-found courage vanished, and she plunged once more into depression.

At this point, Mary was introduced to the second part of the Duke discovery. She had been recording the ups and downs of her Mood-Meter chart; now she was introduced to the autoconditioning technique for changing one's attitudes. She discovered that, by using this remedy, it is possible to live consistently on a level of cheerful purpose and cooperative courage -as can be seen from the right-hand side of her chart.

The shift from repeated depression to consistent courage was not won all at once. After a few days of holding her new level, she got word that her small sister had fallen downstairs and broken her arm. This brought a new plunge below the zero line. But the dip was only to "Downcast," not to "Discouraged." She put her new skill to work and was able again to react courageously instead of with attitudes of fear and defeat.

• She doubled her happiness

The results of her autoconditioning between July 26 and August 25, as appraised by Mary Dolan herself on October 11, was to double her sense of courage, cheerfulness, satisfaction, and enjoyment of life. Nor was this a mere temporary flash in the pan. On October 11, Mary estimated that her enjoyment of life during the first two weeks of October had been between 50 per cent and 100 per cent greater than it had been before she learned about autoconditioning. She summed it up, on October 11, as follows:

My enthusiasm for the method has not diminished in the least. I still use it frequently as a valuable technique in keeping up my "good spirits" as well as for trying out new experiments.... I certainly have remained in my cheerful, enthusiastic frame of mind.

• It strengthened her religious faith

In the process of retraining herself under guidance, Mary found new spiritual insight. The smouldering series of conflicts about the wedding were turned to friendly goodwill by her agreeing to a short postponement in order that needed adjustments might be worked out. She is going forward into her wedded life as a courageous bride, sure of her new-found paths to joy and creative living.

How Autoconditioning Helped with Family Troubles

• Robert came from a struggling family

Our second case shows how autoconditioning cured a college boy of chronic depression at a time when he seemed to be facing stark tragedy.