Cognitive: Depression

• Cognitive explanations for depression

  The cognitive approach suggests that depression results from faulty cognition processing and negative thinking about events (so disturbances in thinking)
• Schemas

  • Mental framework for objects and events that work as shortcuts in understanding the world
  • Includes schemas about ourselves
  • Depression can result from our self-schemas being negative
• Beck's negative triad

  Events are seen by the sufferer with a pessimistic/negative bias due to the development of negative schemas about the world, the self, and the future
• Negative schemas

  • Can lead to overgeneralisation
  • Magnification of problems
  • Selective perception
  • Absolutist thinking
• Ellis' ABC model

  • Activating event (A) is the external situation that there will be a reaction to
  • Belief (B) is why the individual thinks that the activating event happened (rational or irrational)
  • Consequence (C) is the behaviour and emotions caused by the person's beliefs about the activating event
• In depression the activating event is blamed for the unhappiness felt
• Musturbatory thinking


  Thinking in absolutes and that the world must be a certain way for us
• Ellis' ABC model


  Ellis proposed that it is not the activating event itself that directly leads to emotional and behavioural consequences, but rather the beliefs and thoughts associated with it
• Reductionism: Ellis' ABC model


  • only explains reactive depression and not persistent depressive disorder
  • Thus is because reactive depression is depression triggered by life events while depression in PDD is not traceable to life events and it's not obvious what leads the person to become depressed at a particular time
  • So, can only explain some cases of depression therefore the ABC model is reductionist
• Limitation: Ellis' ABC Model


  The ABC model can be criticised as being a simplistic representation of depression. It does not fully account for other factors that contribute to depression, such as genetic predispositions, environmental influences, and physiological aspects.