Introduction
Depression can happen to anyone at any time and can be caused by anything stressful, biological, cognitive or social. Depression that lasts for months on end is most often synonymous with chronic pessimism. What if, over a period of time, you encounter nothing but hardship and difficulties and the coping skills you used before no longer help bring the stress level down? Everywhere you turn, things go wrong. You start to feel helpless. People living with depression find it difficult to perform well in school and at work. For them, it is challenging to find good in every day events, and often overlook their own achievements as they happen.
Learning Perspective
Depression can be treated successfully with medicines and surrounding oneself with supportive family and friends. To help bolster recovery, depression can also be overcome by using the learning perspective of psychology. This is also called behavioral cognitive perspective. This perspective is based on conditioning principles which theorize that “learning is any relatively durable change in behavior or knowledge that is due to experience” (Weiten 169). What we experience and learn as we grow to adulthood becomes part of who we are. Positive reinforcers are rewards or events added to our environment to encourage behaviors to occur. Negative reinforcers are things taken away to encourage behaviors also. But just as we have learned to behave in certain ways, we can learn other ways which can replace those habits over time.
Using the learning perspective, treatment of depression sounds simple but it requires a bit of personal effort on the victim’s part. Some people have found that teaching themselves to take joy in simple things and to take pride in simple accomplishments may mean the end of a lifelong pattern of thinking and behaving that has plagued them their entire lives. These are positive reinforcers to encourage people to take notice of the good and reduce feelings of helplessness and hopelessness.
For example, in order to draw attention toward good things, “Keep a log in which you write down three positive things that come about each day. This will help you convince yourself that favorable outcomes actually happen all the time, making it easier to begin taking action” (76, McGowan). Journaling is only effective if you draw attention away from the bad fortune that befell you. Remember, this is reinforcement toward acknowledging the positive aspects of life. Writing about only the unhappy aspects tends to focus the writer on them too much. Also, it makes all the misfortunes seem to pile up. If you learn to be depressed while writing about your life, you begin learning to be depressed just thinking about it at any time. Even talking about it may become painful.
In some cases, people feel depressed because they aren’t feeling well. In general, being sick makes many people depressed because they have more to contend with daily than the average person. “Between the pain, the awkwardness of cast and crutches, the danger of ice and snow, and being dependent on public transportation, I was not only exhausted, but also depressed” (Close-ups: A Patient’s Perspective). Using the learning perspective of psychology, we learn to feel unhappy when we are younger. Our parents force us to stay inside on a nice day when we have the flu or the measles, and children typically like to play outside with friends. We may feel happy because we get to have a day off from school, but we’re also confined to our beds. This reinforcement causes us to associate the illness with feeling depressed as adults and not being confined indoors to get well.
Learning to change our behavior is a challenge and a constant struggle with ourselves, and often the behavioral cognitive therapy technique cannot be used by itself but it also helps strengthen an individual against a relapse of depression (Evans J.R., Velsor P.V., & Schumacher, J.E.).
Biological Perspective:
The Biological Perspective is the different kinds of treatments people can use to help them with depression and the effects they have on us, like if they worked or if they didn't. Some types of treatments people have used and are using today are depression pills, massage treaments, brain operations, or even getting hypnotized. After reading a few articles I came across one that i really liked. It was about how exerciseing helps the brain and it it very good for depression. I think that is the best treatment for depression because it's safer and heathier, it also gets your mind of somethings as well.
For several decades we've known about one effect of exerise of the brain, the "endorphin high" that makes us feel good during and right after exercise. Recently, scientists have uncovered some longer lasting effects of exercise on the brain. Regular exercise improves your mood, decreases anxiety, improves sleep, improves resillience in the face of stress and rasies self-esteem. All these benefits don't come because you notice what you've lost around your waist. Rather, they come from exercise induced alterations inside your head.
With exercise, several biological changes occur that make your nerve cells more robust. The blood and energy supply to the brian improves. The genes in nerve cells signal the production of proteins called neurotrophic factors or growth factors. These substances induce nerve cells to grow, branch and make connections with one another (neuroplasticly) and in some brain areas give rise to new nerve cells (neurogenesis). These important biological processes, which are essential to adaptation and learning, tend to slow down with age and also in response to stress, after brain injury and in depression. Exercise can speed the process back up again, making it a respectable, though partial, antidote to stress and aging.
Exercise is a pretty good antidepressant, too equal to drugs or psychotherapy in some studies. Exercise and antidepressant medications also appear to be biologically equivalent. Consider the hippocampus, a seahorse-shaped region in the temporal lobe of the brain. It is involved in regulating mood and strong memories. When neuroplasticity and neurogenesis are sluggish, the hippocampus gets smaller. Neuroscientists see this in brain scans of people with depression. Antidepressants and electroconvulsive therapy appear to spur nerve growth in this region. Exercise probably relieves and likely also prevents depression through the same mechanism.
Social Perspective
Cognitive Perspective
In the 1960’s depression was a hot topic for psychologists due to the fact that it was still a mysterious error in human development. Aaron T. Beck, a psychologist at the time, took on the task, along with other psychologists to further understand the human deficiency known as depression.
According to Beck. Depressed people are depressed due to their own thinking. Not only their thoughts but their views, outlook on themselves, and the world. Their thinking is biased towards negative interpretations. These thoughts are brought on during early childhood due to things such as loss at a early age, criticism from parents or teachers, or the depressive attitude of a parent or teacher. Any of the above examples promote the development of underlying schema; the fundamental underlying ways in which people process information, about themselves, the world, or the future. Any type of even that resembles the schema in any way can trigger depression. A cognitive bias is a view of the world. A negative schema helps give rise to the cognitive bias. In his theory, Beck proposed that depressed people often have the following cognitive biases, selective abstraction, overgeneralization, magnification, and minimization. Cognitive therapy seeks to indentify and change distorted or unrealistic ways of thinking, and therefore to influence emotion and behavior.
Cognitive therapy has proved to be beneficial in treating patients who have only partial response to adequate antidepressant therapy. Some patients relapse, or don’t want to take a pharmaceutical approach to treating depression. Cognitive therapy provides an alternative that is not only safe but efficient as well. The fundamental principle behind cognitive therapy is that a thought precedes a mood.
During cognitive therapy, like most other treatment processes, the therapist helps he patient work through several steps. The first being, that the patient accepts that some of his or her perceptions and interpretations of reality may be distorted because of past experiences, hereditary, or biological reasons and that these interpretations leave to negative thoughts. The next step is that patient learns to recognize the negative thoughts and discovers alternative thoughts that reflect reality more closely.
The patient then decides internally whether the evidence supports the negative thought or the alternative thought. The thought process of the therapist is that the patient will recognize distorted thinking and reframe the situation.
Group members
Marci Celotti
Amanda Girard
Kessa Pero
Katie Kemp
Sources
- Miller, Michael Crag. Exercise is a State of Mind. May 8, 2008, http://www3.clinton.edu:2286/ehost/detail?vid=4&hid=108&sid=4fcf7f0d-e518-45ff-83cb-ec80e65bfe76%40sessionmgr108
- Rupke, Stuart J., M.D., Blecke, David, Div. M., M.S.W., Renfrow Marjorie. "Cognitive Therapy for Depression". Michigan State Univeristy Colege of Human Medicine, East Lansing, Michigan.Ebscoe. May 01, 2007.
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McGowan, K. (March-April 2008). Second nature. Psychology Today. 73-79.
- Close-ups: a patient’s perspective. (2008). From http://www.aafp.org/afp/20080215/closeups.html
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Evans, J.R., Velsor, P.V., & Schumacher, J.E. (February 2004). Addressing adolescent
depression: A role for school counselors. Professional School Counseling, 5(3),
211. Retrieved April 16, 2008 from MasterFILE Premier Database
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