Self-system therapy draws on techniques used in other types of therapy, including cognitive therapy, which focuses on reversing the effects of depression on how the patients think. But SST sessions focus on helping patients develop skills and strategies to answer four critical questions:

1. What are your promotion and prevention goals?
2. What are you doing to attain them?
3. What is keeping you from making progress?
4. What can you do differently?

Prevention goals are defined as those that keep bad things from happening. Promotion goals are defined as those that make good things happen.

Because I am devoted to this cause, I will make myself a human guinea pig (is that an oxymoron?) and place myself under the penetrating rays of these questions. My answers:

1. My prevention goal is to keep the air conditioning in my apartment from shutting down again. My promotion goal is to make sure I never again wear a white bra under a white shirt, as I did yesterday.
2. To reach my prevention goal, I will buy new air-conditioning filters in a timely manner instead of waiting until they're clotted with gunk that sort of looks like dryer lint, but is clearly more malevolent. To reach my promotion goal, I'll splash water on my face in the morning and turn on the light when I'm getting dressed.
3. The thing that's keeping me from making progress in both cases is laziness and a dissociative insensitivity to the world around me.
4. What I could do differently would be to force myself to plunge into the frigid Atlantic Ocean this weekend and thus remind myself that I am, in fact, alive—albeit shivering.

Hmm. I suspect I'm missing the subtleties of the treatment. I'll get a copy of the study and do further investigation. Meanwhile, I'm guessing any Duke publicity that's not related to lacrosse players is refreshing.

Press release: Researchers Develop New Specialized Treatment for Depression