Depression-Reframing: Recognizing the Strength in Mental Illness Improves Goal Pursuit Among People Who Have Faced Depression

Widespread narratives frame mental illness as a sign of inherent personal weakness—an alleged weakness that would permanently undermine people’s ability to pursue goals in life. Do these narratives have self-fulfilling consequences? To test this hypothesis, and to attain a practical way to support people in realizing their strengths, we developed a brief (~20 min), highly scalable exercise that highlights the strengths people show when contending with depression. Three experiments ( N total = 748) show that this depression-reframing-exercise enhanced the confidence of people who had experienced depression to pursue their goals in life, 0.30≤ d s ≤0.68 ( N s = 158, 419, and 171); and, over 2 weeks, the progress they reported making towards a valued personal goal by 49% (from 43% reported completion to 64%), d = 0.47 (Experiment 3). While default inherent-weakness-narratives harm goal pursuit among people with depression, efforts to reframe depression can help people with depression recognize and access their strengths.