Depression

Depression

What is Depression ?

A mood disorder characterised by five symptoms from Emotional,Cognitive,Behavioural, and Physiological domains.

These symptoms have to be present for 2 weeks.

There are 2 explanations of Depression. Beck's Negative Triad and Ellis' ABC model.

Beck's Negative Triad

Beck believes that Schemas cause depression, The client has negative views that feed off of each other. Beck also believes that  automatic negative thoughts feed the schema.

e.g you think you are stupid (-ve views about yourself) the you do a test and fail (-ve view of world/ events) this causes you to believe you'll always be stupid/ there is no hope for the future (-ve view of future)

Ellis' ABC Model

A- Activating event

B- Belief in the event

C- Consequence of the belief (maladaptive or adaptive)

if a person has maladaptive thoughts they are more likely to be depressed.

Evaluation :

Good supporting evidence that depression is associated with irrational/ faulty thoughts. Bates et al found that depressed patients who were given more and more Negative automatic thoughts became more and more depressed.

Partial Explanation -  caused by traumatic experiences/ activating events.

Cognitive Behaviour Therapy to treat depression is said to have a 90% success rate.

Negative thoughts may in fact be realistic, it's said that those with…