three months after admission to a psychiatric hospital. Clinical measures (depression and hopelessness) showed significant improvements for all 18 patients, indicating successful treatment. Alongside the reduction in depression, actual present QoL improved significantly over time. In contrast, actual past QoL did not change over time. Successful treatment of depression had no influence of the individual's perception of the past. In addition, there was no significant change in actual future QoL, i.e. how patients realistically estimated their QoL to be one year from now. Thus assessments of the past and of the expected future did not change when patients recovered from a depressive episode. Aspirational QoL was the same between the three time dimensions and remained constant over time. There was always a preference comparisons gap over time -- independent of depression or recovering depression. Our findings suggest the larger the present preference comparison gap, the greater the depression. While the preference comparison gap of the past did not change over time with the decrease of depression, there was a trend for the future preference comparison gap that might become statistically significant with a larger sample size. However, aspirations were not affected by depression, since they remained the same for past, present and future from baseline in hospital to three months later. Overall these findings may indicate that a reduction in the present preference gap should be the main goal for therapeutic actions for depressed patients. An achievable target may be to keep the same preference comparison gap between and over