Depression

• Depression : Behavioural Characteristics

  Activity levels - reduced levels of energy, which have a knock on effect on work, education and social life.

  Disruption to sleep & eating - reduced sleep, insomnia. Waking up too early/ needing more sleep = hypersomnia. Appetite may increase or decrease, leading to weight loss or gain.

  Aggression and self harm - sufferers often irritable, may become verbally or physically aggressive.
• Depression : emotional characteristics

  lower mood - feel worthless and empty

  Anger - negative emotions. Also may experience anger or extreme anger which can be aimed at self or others.

  Lowered self esteem - some hate themselves
• Depression : cognitive characteristics

  poor concentration - find it difficult to stick to a task or make decisions

  dwelling on the negative - pay more attention to the negatives, may have a bias to recalling negative unhappy events

  absolutist thinking - tend to think in a 'black and white thinking' = all good and all bad.
• Depression can involve negative thinking patterns and other processes such as a schema

  schema - a mental framework of beliefs and expectations that influence cognitive processing developed from experience.
• Beck's cognitive theory of depression

  He suggested 3 parts to cognitive vulnerability :

  Faulty info processing - sufferers focus on the negative and ignore the positives. They also tend to blow up small problems out of proportion.

  Negative self schema - they interpret all info about themselves in a negative way.

  The negative triad - when a person is depressed they have negative thoughts about the world, future and themself.
• Advantage of Beck's cognitive theory - research support

  In a review David Clark and Aaron Beck concluded that cognitive vulnerabilities were more common in depressed people, which was confirmed in a study by Cohen, who tracked 473 adolescents measuring their cognitive vulnerability.
• Advantage of Beck's cognitive theory - Real world application

  It's applications in screening and treatment of depression. It can also be applied to cognitive behaviour therapy.
• Ellis's ABC Model

  He said depression is a result of irrational thoughts, which are any thoughts that interfere with us being happy and free from pain.
• Ellis's ABC Model

  A - Activating event

  Ellis focused on situations where irrational thoughts are triggered by external events.

  B - Beliefs

  He identified a range of irrational beliefs. The belief that we must always succeed = musturbation. The belief that life is meant to be fair = utopianism.

  C - Consequences

  when activating event triggers irrational beliefs there are emotional and behavioural consequences.