Psychology: Depressive Disorders Causes & Treatments

Depressive Disorders: Psychological Causes and Treatments

• Key questions to ponder regarding depression include: Why do more recent generations experience more depression? Why are women twice as likely as men to experience depression?

Causes of Major Depression: Behavioral

• Lewinsohn's behavioral theory proposes stress reduces rewards and increases punishments, leading to withdrawal and depression.
• Seligman's learned helplessness theory suggests uncontrollable negative events can cause depression. However, a significant portion of people do not become helpless (as seen in a loud noise study). The reason for this difference remains unclear.

Behavioral Treatments for Depression

• Behavioral activation is a treatment for depression incorporating strategies found at the provided website URL.
• Contingency management, utilizing rewards, is a behavioral technique.
• Improving social behaviors and skills is part of behavioral treatment.

Causes of Major Depression: Cognitive

• Cognitive causes relate to how individuals think about things. Humorously illustrated examples of cognitive influences on depression are available at the provided URL.
• The reformulated learned helplessness theory, developed by Lyn Abramson and Martin Seligman, emphasizes the importance of cognition and causal attributions in understanding depression. Misfortune explanation style is called explanatory style or attributional style.
• Factors within a pessimistic attributional style relate to permanence, pervasiveness, and personalization.

Pessimistic Cognitive Style

• A pessimistic cognitive style is correlated with depression but studies show it may also cause depression. Psychology undergraduates experiencing pessimism related to exam failure are examples of this association. Studies of 400 third-grade students showcase that pessimists are more susceptible to prolonged depression.

Optimistic Cognitive Style

• An optimistic cognitive style is associated with various positive outcomes. Insurance salespersons who are optimistic tend to sell more and quit less frequently. Optimistic college students tend to perform better than expected based on their prior SAT and GPA scores. Sports teams with optimistic styles demonstrate better win-loss records, as shown in a content analysis study. Optimism is related to better physical health, shown by better rejection rates of tumor cells in groups of rats.

Cognitive Causes of Major Depression (cont)

• Hopelessness theory (Lyn Abramson et al., 1989) involves negative events combined with specific negative inferential tendencies (stable, global, negative consequences, and negative self-characteristics).
• Response style theory (Susan Nolen-Hoeksema) elucidates rumination—distinguishing it from reflectiveness—as a key cognitive factor contributing to depression. Pessimism combined with rumination can result in severe depression.
• The negative cognitive triad (Aaron Beck) identifies negative views concerning self, world, and future as contributing to depression. Negative thoughts and attitudes, like "If I don't succeed, people won't like me," or "I'm worthless", are significant factors.
• Cognitive errors, such as overgeneralization, magnification of negatives, minimization of positives, and selective abstraction, contribute to distorted thinking and potentially depression.

Cognitive Treatments for Depression

• Aaron Beck and Judith Beck are mentioned in the discussion of cognitive-behavioral approaches to treating depression. Links to online resources are included for their therapy sessions.
• The general cognitive therapy approach for depression involves identifying and recording automatic thoughts, challenging these thoughts with evidence, and recognizing and addressing other negative thinking patterns.

Causes of Major Depression: Interpersonal

• Interpersonal difficulties, the most prevalent stressors associated with depression, are significant factors.
• Issues like grief, interpersonal loss, role disputes, and transitions are examples of interpersonal stressors.
• Interpersonal skill deficits also contribute to depression.

Interpersonal Theories of Depression

• The interactional model (James Coyne) details the vicious cycle involving a high need for approval, rejection sensitivity, excessive reassurance seeking, and societal rejection responses. These cycles lead to more reassurance seeking.

Causes of Major Depression: Psychodynamic

• Psychodynamic theories highlight the role of dependency needs and introjected hostility in depression. Grief and anger turned inward due to abandoned or rejected relationships can contribute.
• Unsafe or insecure childhood relationships are also implicated with the risk of depression.

Psychodynamic Therapy for Depression

• Jonathan Shedler's discussion of psychodynamic approaches to depression treatment is linked (with a relevant URL).
• Key discussion points include focusing on emotion, identifying recurring themes, exploring the past, focusing on relationships, highlighting the therapy relationship, and exploring fantasy life.

Some Additional Approaches to Psychological Treatment of Depression

• The presentation includes acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT—with an example and a URL), interpersonal therapy, couples therapy, and culturally-responsive therapy as further treatment approaches.