Explaining Depression

• What is the cognitive approach to depression?

  Depression is due to irrational thoughts, resulting from maladaptive internal mental processes. Depressed people's cognitions are in some way disturbed/ broken in some way
• What is schema?

  - mental frameworks/ expectations based on experience

  - they allow us to quickly process large amounts of sensory information and make automatic assumptions and responses

  - negative schemas result in automatically negative cognitive biases

  - we use them as mental shortcuts

  - this means we can quickly understand the world and it doesn't take too much mental energy to decide how to respond to a range of situations
• How do Beck and Ellis explain depression and how do they propose to treat it?

  - as a result of faulty negative thinking

  - the best way of treating depression is to challenge and change this negative bias
• Beck's Negative Triad

  - people who are depressed have 3 types of schemas with a persistent automatic negative bias

  - negative beliefs about the self (self-schemas) e.g. feeling inadequate or unworthy

  - negative schemas about the world, seeing it as hostile or threatening

  - negative schemas about the future, assuming things will always turn out badly

  - these negative thought patterns can lead to negative behaviours such as avoidance, social withdrawal and inaction e.g. avoiding social interactions in fear of being ridiculed
• How does the negative triad develop?

  it develops in childhood, but provides the framework for persistent biases in adulthood, leading to cognitive distortions (perceiving the world inaccurately)
• What are cognitive distortions?

  examples include:

  - overgeneralisation (when the individual has one negative experience and assumes that this will always happen)

  - selective abstraction (mentally filtering out positive experiences and only focussing on the negative)
• Ellis' ABC Model

  - explains how someone with depression responds to stress, adversity and unpleasant events in a way that leads to unhealthy emotions

  - A - Activating Event. This can be anything that happens to an individual with or without depression(large e.g. end of a relationship or small e.g. missing a bus). The difference between those with depression and without is their belief

  - B - Belief. For people without depression, beliefs about A are rational. People with depression have irrational beliefs

  - C - Consequence. Rational beliefs lead to positive consequences, irrational beliefs lead to negative consequences
• What is mustabatory thinking?

  - the consequence of not accepting that we don't live in a perfect world

  - 'There are 3 musts that hold us back: I must do well. You must treat me well. The world must be easy' - Ellis

  - these beliefs result in a lot of pressure

  - the fact that we fail to achieve unrealistic goals, other people don't behave the way we want them to, or an unexpected event happens and ruins our plans leads to disappointment
• STRENGTH of the cognitive approach to explaining depression: research supports the role of irrational thoughts in depression

  EVIDENCE - Grazioli and Terry assessed the thinking styles of 65 women before giving birth and 6 weeks after

  EXP - it was found that those women with negative thinking styles were the most likely to develop postpartum depression, especially in women with infants who were identified as having a difficult temperament

  EVAL - this supports the idea that faulty thinking leads to depression, but also that there is a diathesis-stress mechanism to Beck's theory - negative thinking is a vulnerability which can be triggered by aversive life experiences like motherhood
• STRENGTH of the cognitive approach to explaining depression: have led to effective therapies

  EVIDENCE - cognitive theories that explain depression have led to highly effective cognitive therapies

  EXP - March showed CBT had an effectiveness rate of 81% after 36 weeks of treatment, the same as drug therapy

  EVAL - these treatments have been successful in helping people recover from depression, and this suggests the underlying cognitive explanations are valid
• WEAKNESS of the cognitive approach to explaining depression: cognitive explanations are not full explanations of depression

  EVIDENCE - many people with depression also experience anger

  EXP - also, people with bipolar depression experience manic phases, times when they feel extremely happy, overly excited, confident and focussed

  EVAL - these features of some types of depression are hard to explain with theories like Beck's that explain depression as due to negative schemas, as schemas are resistant to change. This suggests that biological factors (e.g. due to chemical imbalances) may be a better explanation for depression
• WEAKNESS of the cognitive approach to explaining depression: there is significant evidence for a biological origin of depression

  EVIDENCE - family studies and genetic research suggests a predisposition to depression is inherited (likely genes influence activity of neurochemicals like serotonin in the brain)

  EXP - also, the effectiveness of drug treatments like SSRIs suggests the cognitive explanation is not complete

  EVAL - this shows there is a biological aspect to depression
• WEAKNESS of the cognitive approach to explaining depression: they assume depression is based on irrational thoughts

  EVIDENCE - cognitive theories depend on the assumption that the person with depression's thoughts are irrational

  EXP - it could be depression is a reasonable response to the challenges they face e.g. poverty/ racism

  EVAL - people without depression may have a cognitive bias - they live their lives with rose-tinted glasses, selectively perceiving the world in a positive light, having overly positive self-evaluations and unrealistic optimism. People with depression see the world without this positive bias