L3 - Depression Flashcards
1
Q
What is depression?
A
- Sadness, discouragement, pessimism, hopelessness
- Sometimes adaptive e.g low mood helps to disengage individuals from unproductive efforts
2
Q
When does depression become clinically significant?
A
- Unusually severe or prolonged
- Results in significant impairment at the personal, relational and professional levels
3
Q
What Is major depressive disorder?
A
5+ symptoms have been present during the same 2-week period and represent a change from previous functioning
4
Q
What are the symptoms of MDD?
A
- Depressed mood most of the day
- Diminished interest/pleasure
- Significant weight loss/gain, appetite increase/decrease
- Insomnia/hypersomnia
- Psychomotor agitation or retardation
- Fatigue/loss of energy
- Feeling of worthlessness
- Diminished ability to think
- Recurrent thoughts of death
5
Q
What are features of depressive disorders?
A
- High comorbidity with anxiety/stress
- More prevalent in females than males
- Variety of symptoms: hard to diagnose
- High likelihood of recurrence - increases with number of prior episodes and presence of comorbid disorders
6
Q
What are the genetic causes? (Evidence)
A
Prevalence of mood disorders 2/3x higher among blood relatives
7
Q
What are environmental causes?
A
- Stressful life events: 70% of people with a first onset of depression
- Chronic stress
- Social media
8
Q
What is an example of gene-environment interplay?
A
- Diathesis stress model
- Neurotic individuals have negative appraisal of events and are more likely to experience stressful life events
9
Q
What is the psychodynamic perspective?
A
- Anger turned inwards
- Response to imagined/symbolic loss
- Similarities between depression and grief
10
Q
What is the behavioural perspective?
A
- Lack of positive reinforcement
- Lack of the reinforcement capacity of previously reinforcing stimulus
- Increase in negative reinforcement
- No causal link
11
Q
What is the Behavioural Activation Treatment?
A
- Scheduling daily activities, mastery and pleasure tasks, exploring alternative behaviours to reach goals
- Goals are to increase levels of positive reinforcement and reduce avoidance and withdrawal
12
Q
What is the cognitive perspective?
A
- Cognitive Depressive Triad: About negative appraisals about the self, the world, the future
- Depressogenic schemas = rigid, extreme and counterproductive way of thinking
- Select, code and evaluate stimuli
- Significance of experiences
- Accompanied by memory biases
13
Q
What is Beck’s Cognitive Theory? (graph)
A
- Early experience = dysfunctional attitudes/beliefs = depressogenic schemas = cognitive triad
- Depressogenic schemas = severe/mild stressful events = activation of schemas = cognitive distortions = conditional beliefs = NATs (negative automatic thoughts)
- NATs = depressive symptoms = Behavioural, motivation, affective, cognitive, somatic
14
Q
What is Beck’s Cognitive Theory?
A
- Depressed people have reduced positivity attribution bias
- Cognitive vulnerability predicts onset and recurrence
- Diathesis Stress = stressful life events moderate association between cognitive vulnerability and depression
15
Q
What is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy?
A
- Our interpretation of events determine our emotional states
- Distorted or irrational thinking patterns lead to emotional problems and maladaptive behaviour
- Result from inaccurate or biased processing of information in the world = cognitive distortions
- e.g NATs (im being boring) = beliefs/distortions (if people know me, they’ll know im useless) = schemas (im unloveable)
16
Q
What are the 10 aspects of cognitive behavioural therapy?
A
- Emotional reasoning - I felt it so it must be true
- Overgeneralisation - a single negative event is evidence it will always be so
- Mental filter - ignoring positive in situation to focus only on the negative
- Should statements - Unreasonable demands on yourself or others - perfectionism - refusal to be human and fallible
- Labelling - Condemning self/others over a single issue
- Black and white thinking - Using terms like never or always about issues or events
- Personalisation - believing you are the cause of events without evidence
- Mind-reading - believing you can hear people’s thoughts without evidence
- Catastrophising - becoming hysterical and exaggerating
- Fortune telling - dire predictions are made as if they are already fact
17
Q
What is the ABC model?
A
- Activating event: actual event
- Beliefs: rational/irrational evaluations
- Consequences: emotions, NATs, behaviours, bodily sensations
18
Q
What is the downward arrow technique?
A
- Identifying deeper thoughts and underlying beliefs and schemas
- Continuous inquiring about the meaning attributed to thoughts/actions
- Therapist introduces alternative interpretations for the patient in order to challenge and restructure their thoughts
19
Q
CBT for depression?
A
- Brief treatment: 10-20 sessions
- Less focus on early life experiences, focused on here and now
- Empirical in its approach - testing alternative thoughts by collecting evidence
- GOALS:
1) Bring depression scores back to normal
2) Identify and challenge NATs through self-monitoring and analysis against cognitive distortions, Socratic questioning and guided discovery
3) Restructure core beliefs/schemas about self, world and future
20
Q
Is CBT for depression effective?
A
- 40% reduction in symptoms after 16 week treatment but some relapse
- Meta-analysis suggests antidepressants are more effective than CBT
- In recovered depressive patients, inducing negative mood creates thinking patterns similar to when they are depressed
21
Q
What is mindfulness/third wave CBT?
A
- Emphasis on changing awareness and individual’s relationship with their thoughts
- Thoughts as mental events - thoughts are not facts
- Decentering - I am not my thoughts
- Effective - 8 weekly group sessions = more effective the more previous depressive episodes you have had
