Psychopathology - Depression Flashcards
(12 cards)
What is depression?
It is a mood disorder characterised by persistent low mood, loss of interest or pleasure in activities, and other symptoms like fatigue, sleep disturbances, and changes in appetite
What are the types of depression?
- Unipolar disorder: sudden fit of depression, can be reactive (e.g traumatic event) or endogenous (e.g. neurological)
- Bipolar disorder: manic and depressive episodes, cyclical change of mood, mania (e.g. overactivity, rapid speech, feeling happy or agitated)
What are the Emotional Characteristics of depression?
- Lowered Mood: defining emotional aspect
- Anger: at self or others, can cause self-harm
- Low Self-esteem: self loathing
What are the Behavioural Characteristics of depression?
- Anxiety levels: lethargic, leads to withdrawal,
- Disruptions to sleep: psychomotor agitation, insomnia/hypersomnia
- Disruptions to eating: appetite, weight gain/loss
- Agression/Self-harm
- Anhedonia: decreased pleasure, loss of interest
What are the Cognitive Characteristics of depression?
- Poor concentration: difficulty concentrating, ruminating, poor decision making
- Dwelling on negatives: more negative than positive, bias to recalling unhappy events
- Absolutist thinking: all good or all bad
What are the Key Assumptions of the Cognitive Approach?
- Ppl w/ MH disorders have distorted and irrational thinking, may cause maladaptive behaviour
- It’s they way you think about the problem rather than the problem itself that causes the disorder
- Ppl can overcome MH disorders by learning to use more appropriate cognitions
What is Beck’s (1967) cognitive explanation for depression?
3 parts to cognitive vulnerability:
* Faulty info-processing: absolutist thinking = errors in judgement
* Negative self-schema: feeds into bad thoughts
* Negative triad: negative views on the world, self and future, cycle of bad thoughts
What is Ellis’ (1962) approach to depression?
- Proposed that good mental health is a result of rational thinking
- Argued that sufferers of depression based their lives on irrational beliefs due to absolutist thinking
- ABC Model
What is Ellis’s ABC Model?
- Action: external events
- Belief: irrational beliefs
- Consequence: emotional and behavioural
- Suggests an action is affected by belief, which results in consequence
What is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)?
- Most commonly used type of psychological treatment for MH problems
- Behavioural + Cognitive techniques used
- Therapist aims to make client aware of relationship between thought, emotion and actions in order to break the vicious cycle of maladaptive thoughts
What is Beck’s Cognitive Therapy?
- Based on the Negative Triad
- Client assessed to discover the severity of their condition
- Therapist establishes base line prior to treatment to help monitor improvement
- Therapist uses Reality testing (refraining bad thoughts)
What are alternate explanations for depression?
- The biological approach suggests that genes and neurotransmitters may cause depression
- The sucess of drug therapies for treating depression suggests that neurotransmitters do play an important role in reducing symptoms
