A potentially fatal mistake… scary headline, isn’t it? It’s the truth though, and I speak of this from personal experience. There is a mistake being perpetuated throughout the country, but particularly (from what I observe) in the education system that may be preventing us from saving lives.

What is this mistake? It’s assuming and believing that it is low self-esteem that leads to depression, and that raising self-esteem can get rid of depression.

Low self-esteem doesn’t cause depression… low self-worth does. And no, they are NOT the same thing. Meriam-Webster defines self-esteem as “a confidence and satisfaction in oneself”. You can have self-confidence without self-worth… you can believe that you are good at something, without believing that it makes you worth anything.

I speak from personal experience. I have never had a problem with self-confidence. I have, and I may sound conceited here, always known that I was smart and at least average in the looks department. Any mental endeavour tends to come easily for me (except remembering people’s names… one of these days I’m going to get around to fixing that). So my self-confidence was fine.

The problem is that I didn’t think I was worth anything. It didn’t matter if I was smart, even if I were a genius, the smartest person in the world, and it wouldn’t have mattered if I was the most handsome man to walk the earth. I didn’t think that meant anything for me… it contributed nothing to my self-worth.

If you don’t believe that you are worth anything, then you don’t believe that you contribute anything to others, either. You end up with little or no incentive to do anything, or even to live. You can have untold amounts of confidence in your abilities, but without a belief that you are worth something, it doesn’t mean anything.

Low self-confidence is a good indicator of low self-worth. It’s difficult to have anything other than low self-worth if you have no confidence in yourself. That doesn’t mean that the opposite is true, however… you can’t assume that someone with high self-confidence has good self-worth, also. That also means that raising someone’s self-esteem, as they put so much emphasis on today, doesn’t necessarily (and really, it’s not even all that LIKELY) raise the real key, their self-worth.

Since the true cause of depression here is low self-worth, not low self-esteem, the emphasis on self-esteem in the education system is misplaced. What makes it even more misplaced, however, is that you can’t give someone self-esteem… they have to earn it. And that’s why some people think that it’s self-esteem that’s the issue… what you do that you feel earns you self-esteem can, at the same time, help you to feel you have worth. If you feel like you are doing something worthy of greater of self-esteem, you may feel that a little bit of that “worthy” rubs off on you.

Mistaking the cause of depression, and the cure, can lead to attempting the wrong treatment. If you use the wrong treatment, you are unlikely to cure the problem… and with depression, that can be fatal.

By the way, I’m making a request with this article, as an experiment… if you like it please vote for it on Reddit (you can click here), in addition to whatever thing you normally use.