Understanding Depressive Disorders: A Comprehensive Guide to Psychological Theories
Psychodynamic Theories of Depressive Disorders
The first psychological formulations of depressive disorders came from psychoanalysis. Abraham conceived depression as an exacerbation of a constitutional legacy of oral eroticism. Freud differentiated normal depressive reactions (melancholy) from depressive reactions due to losing a loved one (bereavement). Both answers involve losing something.
To minimize the impact of losing love, the child internalizes a representation of that object, or introjects it. Object relations theory pointed out how this ideal state of self-esteem or well-being was determined not by a single trauma or series of traumas and failures but by the quality of mother-child relationships in early life. Overall, the most recent psychoanalytic theories claim that depressed people are those that, from a young age and due to losing a beloved object through separation, death, or rejection, experience psychological distress.
Theorists such as Blatt, Bowlby, Arieti, and Bemporad have postulated the existence of at least two different types of depression:
- Anaclitic: Individuals who experience this first type, known as anaclitic, are dominated by others or dependent. They are primarily concerned with interpersonal relationships.
- Introjective: Individuals who experience this second type, known as introjective, are dominated by goals or self-criticism. They are mainly concerned with issues of achievement.
Behavioral Theories of Depressive Disorders
Behavioral theories base themselves on learning theories, particularly operant conditioning. According to Ferster, the main feature of depression is the reduced frequency of positively reinforced behavior. This can be caused by:
- Unexpected, sudden, and quick changes in the midst of losses.
- Programs involving a high cost of reinforcement that require major changes to develop.
- The inability to develop behavioral repertoires due to the emergence of a pathological spiral of fewer positive reinforcements, which in turn produce a further reduction in behavior.
- Limited observational repertoires that would lead depressed individuals to distort reality.
For Lewinsohn, depression is a response to losing or lacking positive reinforcement contingent upon behavior. Costello pointed out that the most characteristic trait of depressed people is losing general interest in their environment.
Cognitive Theories of Depressive Disorders
Theories of Information Processing: Beck’s Theory
Beck’s theory states that there is a systematic distortion or negative cognitive bias, which can be broken down into a triad:
- A negative view of self
- A negative view of the world
- A negative view of the future
Beck says that in many cases of endogenous depression, the etiology does not have to do with the interaction of three factors:
- The presence of dysfunctional attitudes or beliefs about the meaning of certain kinds of highly stressful experiences.
- A subjective assessment of the importance of these experiences.
- The occurrence of a specific stressor or previous depressogenic factors.
Dysfunctional patterns are different from the patterns of normal subjects both in structure and content:
- In terms of content, dysfunctional schemas contain rules and tacit beliefs. Individual stable attitudes about oneself and the world are dysfunctional and unrealistic.
- As to the structure, dysfunctional patterns in depression tend to be more rigid and impermeable.
Beck’s theory hypothesizes that depressogenic schemas are the cognitive diathesis for depression. These schemas can be further broken down into:
- Arbitrary Inferences: The process of reaching a conclusion without evidence.
- Selective Abstraction: An assessment of experience focusing on one detail.
- Overgeneralization: The process of extracting a detail from an experience to develop a conclusion or rule.
- Maximization and Minimization: Mistakes made in assessing the magnitude of an experience.
- Personalization: The tendency to easily attribute external events to oneself.
- Absolutist and Dichotomous Thinking: The tendency to classify all experiences in one of two opposing categories.
Teasdale’s Differential Activation Hypothesis
Teasdale’s theory is a vulnerability-stress model that assumes the type of events ultimately leading to clinical depression in some individuals can produce at least a transient depressed or mild mood in most people.
Cognitive-Social Theories
The Theory of Learned Helplessness
Seligman states that learned helplessness can be caused by any of the following:
- A history of failure in handling situations.
- A history of reinforcements on a non-contingent basis that has not allowed the subject to learn the complex skills needed to control their environment.
The Reformulated Theory of Learned Helplessness
This theory states that when experiencing an uncontrollable situation, people try to explain the cause of that uncontrollability. If such an explanation attributes the lack of control to internal factors, there is a decline in self-esteem. Attributing the lack of control to stable factors would lead to expecting uncontrollability in future situations. Similarly, attributing failure to control global factors leads to expecting uncontrollability in other situations. In essence, helplessness and depression deficits are generalized to other situations due to internal, stable, and global cognitive vulnerability factors.
The Theory of Hopelessness
This theory is a diathesis-stress model. The causal chain begins with vital negative events occurring. These events lead to classes of attributes that people make about those events. Ultimately, this results in hopelessness and depression.
Cognitive-Behavioral Theories
Rehman’s Self-Control Theory
This”diathesis-stres” model, as Rehman calls it, is specified in any combination of the following conditions:
- Deficit behaviors in self-observation, such as increased attention to negative events.
- Deficit behaviors in self-assessment, such as setting high standards that are too high.
- Deficit in self-reinforcing behavior, such as insufficient rewards or excessive punishment.
Lewinsohn’s Autofocalization Theory
This theory states that the presence of stressors and the consequent interruption of behavior result in a negative emotional reaction or depressed mood, whose intensity depends on the importance of the event and/or the level of interruption of daily life. Increased self-awareness and the intensification of negative emotions destroy the individual’s self-perceptions that serve to protect and enhance their self-esteem overall.
Interpersonal Theories of Depressive Disorders
Coyne suggests that depression is a response to the breakdown of interpersonal relationships in which individuals used to obtain social support. The response of significant others in their environment will serve to maintain or exacerbate depressive symptoms. When a depressed person is aware of these negative reactions in others, they emit more symptomatic behavior, establishing a vicious cycle that continues until people from their social environment are completely removed from the depressed person, leaving them alone and confirming their negative view of themselves.
Gotlib states that the severity of the stressor depends on external circumstances but also on some elements of vulnerability, either interpersonal or intrapersonal. Once depression has begun, two factors converge in sustaining or exacerbating it. The first is interpersonal and involves both the depressed individual’s expression and their social skills. The second factor is the negative cognitive bias of depression, resulting in increased sensitivity and attention to negative aspects of their environment.
Psychological Theories of Bipolar Disorders
. Freud conceived the manic phases of bipolar disorders in context energético.Fue Lewin who laid the foundations of basic interpretive scheme for mania psychoanalysis, formulating it in terms of regressive processes and defense. Mania conceived as a defensive disruption of depression, not as the outcome. For Aleksandrowicz, bipolar patients are characterized by a narcissistic personality, which means basically an exaggerated need autoestima.-Outside the realm of psychoanalysis, Beck argues that individuals have manic or dysfunctional attitudes vital rules that, like depression, are rigid and little realistas.B. presupposes the existence of a biased or distorted processing of information. “These thoughts and images form the equivalent of the negative cognitive triad of depression, mania is called the positive cognitive triad.