Depression Flashcards
What is depression
Mood disorder characterised by extreme sadness
What constitutes to diagnosis of depression
Sam states an individual must exxperniebce at least 5 symptoms including depressed mood and loss of interest or pleasure in activities nearly everyday for two weeks
What are emotional characteristics of depression
Depressed me of, loss of interest and pleasure and worthlessness
Why are cognitive characteristic
Reduced concentration and negative beliefs about self and suicidal thoughts
What are behavioural changes in depression
Change in activity and change in eating and sleeping habits and social impairment
What is depressed mood
The ever present and overwhelming feeling of intense sadness hopelessness and lowered mood in everyday life
What is loss of interest and pleasure
Lack of enthusiasm associated with lack of concern of pleasure in daily activities
What is worthlessness
Constant feelings of low self worth and inappropriate feeling of guilt
What is reduced concentration
Difficulty in paying attention and maintaining concentration or slowed down thinking and decision making interferes with work
What are negatiove self beliefs about self
Experience persistent nengative beliefs about themselves and abilities
What are auicidal thoughts
Some depressives can have constant thoughts of suicidal and death
What is change in activity
Reduced amount bra of energy resulting in fatigue and high levels of inactivity in some cases depression can lead to opposite effect psychomotor agitation they struggle to relax and may pace up and down
What is changing is eating and sleeping habits
People may experience a change in appetites which may mean they eat more or less than normal and gain or lose weight also they may have excessive sleeping or no sleep
Social impairments
Can be reduced levels of social interaction with friends and relations
How does cog approach explain depression
In terms of faulty and irrational thought process and perceptions
What are negative schemes
Develop in childhood and adolescents as a result of rejection by parents in for of critiscism or exclusion or loss of family member this then filters into adulthood providing a negative framework to view life in a pessimistic fashion
Depressed people develop negative schemes about themselves
What did Aaron beck believe
Depression is caused by negative thinking especially about one self and that negative thinking comes before development of depression
What is negative views of self
Begins in childhood as negative self schemes from experience such as rejection from press and see themselves as worthless
What is negative view of the world
Where obstacles and issues are perceived within one enviromet cannot be dealt with
What is negative feeding into the future
Where personal worthlessness is seen as blocking any improvement in the future
What did Albert Ellis believe
That depressive Mistakenly blame external events for their unhappiness however it is their interpretation of these events that is to blame for the distress and the key to tondepressionis in irrational beliefs
Depression is caused by irrational thoughts differed by unpleasant experience
What is the abc model
A is the activating agent
B is the belief
C is the consequence of the belief
It’s not the activating event that causes the consequence its consequence is caused by beliefs about the activating event having irrational s beliefs to unhealthy negative reactions and emotions which can turn into depression and experience events excessively negatively in part b
Practical application
Ellis and becks explanation has led to practictocal application in treatment of depression
The development of treatments such as Cat this is a strength as our understanding of schemes and cog processes has led to development of treatments which target faulty cognitions further the fact that beck reviewed the effectiveness of cog approach and found it highly effective in treating depression showing the cog approach must be accurate thus increasing validity of becks explanation for depression
There is supporting research
There is a wealth of research to support becks cognitive explanation listed et all study used students volunteers who took planet ina an attention task and wee presented with positive and negative and neutral words they found that depressed participants spent longer attending to the negative words tha the non depressed group this is a strength s it shows depressed people have a cognitive biase towards negative ideas thus attending longer to negative words thus increasing the validity
Approach is a reductionist
A limitation of the cognapproach explaining depression is that it could be considered a reductionist the cog approach is overly focused on internal mental thought processes and ignores credible research from other approaches such as there isbevdence thstnlow levels of serotonin can lead to depression there it can be seen as too simplistic
