Theories of Depression

Theories of Depression

Bandura's Social Cognitive Theory of Depression 


Albert Bandura's Social Cognitive learning theory suggested that people are shaped by the interactions between their behaviors, thoughts, and environmental events. Each piece in the puzzle can and does affect the shape of the other pieces. Human behavior ends up being largely a product of learning, which may occur vicariously, as well as through direct experience. Bandura points out that depressed people tend to hold themselves solely responsible for bad things in their lives and are full of self-recrimination and self-blame. 


http://www.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=doc&id=13007&cn=5


Julian Rotter's Locus of Control Theory

Julian Rotter observed people in therapy and noticed that:

• Different people, given identical conditions for learning, learn different things
• Some people respond predictably to reinforcement, others less so, and some respond unpredictably

Some people see a direct and strong connection between their behaviour and the rewards and punishments received

- The basic assumption is that your behaviour is determined not just by the presence or size of reinforcements, but by the beliefs about what the results of your behaviour are likely to be i.e., how likely you are to get the reinforcement.

- He believed that that if you see a link between behaviours and reinforcers then your behaviour is affected by the reinforcers.

http://wilderdom.com/personality/LocusOfControl.html

Martin Seligman Learned Helplessness Theory

- Learned helplessness is the state of mind created when an animal or human being learns to behave helplessly, even with the means to escape or avoid an unpleasant situation. The learned helplessness theory holds that clinical depression and other mental illnesses may arise from the perceived lack of control over a situation. 

- Many aspects of human helplessness have no correlations to animals. Vicarious learning or “modeling” is one of the more intriguing aspects. People can observe another person who is experiencing uncontrollable events and learn to be helpless themselves. This phenomenon is sometimes called vicarious trauma. 

- Learning to be hopeless in many things has led to many psychologists to believe that it is a major cause of depression. 

http://directory.leadmaverick.com/Helping-Psychology/DallasFort-WorthArlington/TX/10/9748/index.aspx

Aaron Beck's Cognitive Theory of Depression

- According to Dr. Aaron Beck, negative thoughts, generated by dysfunctional beliefs are typically the primary cause of depressive symptoms. A direct relationship occurs between the amount and severity of someone's negative thoughts and the severity of their depressive symptoms. In other words, the more negative thoughts you experience, the more depressed you will become. 

- Beck also asserts that there are three main dysfunctional belief themes that dominate depressed people's thinking: 

1) I am defective or inadequate 

2) All of my experiences result in defeats or failures 

3) The future is hopeless. Together, these three themes are described as the Negative Cognitive Triad. 

- When these beliefs are present in someone's cognition, depression is very likely to occur.

http://www.mhcinc.org/poc/view_doc.php?type=doc&id=13006&cn=5

LOBOTOMY

The Lobotomist

The Lobotomist which was and invention by Dr. Walter Freeman, lobotomy was created in order to help people with mental needs that could not be help by any other medication.Lobotomy is to separate frontal lobe with the rest of your brain and to stop the emotional access for people suffering from mental disorders. The procedure for the lobotomy was mostly performed on old people left in asylum or other with mental  disorder which had nothing else to do then to suffer for their sickness and Walter Freman believed he could help them out . In 1930 the preformed shock therapy this proved that the meta disability of the people came from the brain. In order to prefor the lobotomy Dr. Freeman lookd for the fastest path to get to the brain, and also started the perfection of the lobotomy in search of a cheaper and accessible cure for psychiatric patients. The lobotomy consisted in "sleeping patients insert an ice pick trough their peeled eyeball and lid, then he would tap the ice pick with a surgical hammer and break through the orbital cavity of the eye to the prefrontal lobe. He would wiggle the ice pick to sever the frontal lobes . After the procedure patients would leave emotionles and with black eyes. The effect of the labotomy  many people should improvement in their metal emotions and would change into having less frustrating feeling. Mistakes could have been done easily with the lobotmy many people could loss their lifes, it was performed on people with no other alternitives who belived the only way they counld be fix was with this procedure. One of the paitiens los thiere life with a careless incident while Dt. freeman took a picture while conduncting the procedure.Dr. Freeman had about 8 patients per day. Years later the medical community came againts this and freedom's opportunity to conduct this expirement became less. Then the "pill" was developed it had the same effect as the lobotomy but had reduced the risk of people lossing their lifes and was not as dangerous. A decade later the procedure was viewed as barbaric and Freeman was ordered to halt any procedures in asylums or hospitals.  He was later viewed as a moral moster this was one of his bigest preoccupations to clear his name but this was never done. People had less respect for him and he could not preform more lobotomist since it was a risk for patients and had many side effects like the ones already metioned.

VIDEO REFLECTION:BOY INTERUPPTED

After watching the video of  BOY INTERRUPTED the way  I viewed how bipolar disorder worked completly changed. Since there was a completely diffrent point of view shown we could view that bipolar disease does not only affect a person but the family and the people close to that person. Evan Perry the boy on the video was diagnosed with bipolar disease when in those times it was uncommon to diagnose a kid with that disease. It also comes to my attention that there is no way to completly remove this disease there are only ways to control it, and maintain a person in a stable condition. I found it intresting that there is a great amount of pills given to a person in order to control bipolar disease and you need pills to control the effects of other pills. It is sad to see that Evan had a hard time being himself since his mood was mostly controled by pills in a way. It must also be very rough for parents to see there kids having such a hard time day by day and when you belive things are going great with your kid he decides to commite suicide. It is a enourmous responsibility for parents to take care of kids like Evan since you never know what they are actually thing or planing to and you cant be taking care of them 24/7. Something that is worring is that there is still no cure for Bipolar Disease and it is something which is affecting society day after day.  This video can increase anyone's awerness on the topic and the results and implications it has on people is also shown. The knowledge and importance on this topic helps me understand how people can change into such drastic moods.

The Stroop Effect

The stroop effect is an experiment that was first conducted by John Ridley Stroop in the 1935. As stated by the dictionary, the stroop effect is a psychological experiment that tests the reaction time of a task. The task taken in consideration is the one of looking at our ability to read words faster and automatically than when we say colors. The cognitive mechanism that is involved in this experiment is called direct attention, you have to manage your attention, stop, think and then respond to it.
"This effect is a demonstration of interference, in which the brain experiences slowed processing time because it is trying to sort through conflicting information." This expirement also shows us that people have a harder time thinking what color the word is than saying the word  the brain delays on actually knowing automatically and takes more time analyzing the  color the letters have. Why this happens? Well, the both areas that are trying to function: read and talk are giving signals to the same area on the brain at the same time, which makes it difficult to process and therefore makes the person say it slower.
The experiment consists of first giving the word of the color with the letter of their same color. The person is asked to read the set of words and they are timed. Then, they are asked to do it again, but this time the letters of the color are painted with another color that does not match the word. They are also timed. The results say that when you read the word with a different color, it will take you more time.
My experiment will be conducted the same way as John Ridely Stroop did, only that I will use high school students, boys and girls to analyze the data and results.

The Stoop Effect or the one about short term memory

The Placebo Effect - Is it real or just imagined?

After reading the articles and learning more about placebo effects I got a better undestanding on what it was, in the articles it is said that the ´´placebo effect is the measurable, observable, or felt improvement in health or behavior not attributable to a medication or invasive treatment that has been administered.´´ This tells us that it is a was of curring people with out actually giving them real medication  and, it makes you feel better as you asume what you are given will give you stability. THe whole idea about the placebo effect was invented by  H. K. Beecher.  He evaluated 15 clinical trials concerned with different diseases and found that 35% of 1,082 patients were satisfactorily relieved by a placebo alone he found out that for some people pills worked in order to satisfy their needs and believing it what they were taking gave them more life. Many other diffrent test were done and provided the testers with diffrent informations.Psychologist have came to conclutions which informs us that placebos work because consumers on the pill believe the will be healed by the pill and they mostly tell us that it depends on the state of mind. Our thought and mind have the ability to get us into better situation and help us overcome illnesses we just have to belive. Before any medication exsited sold by pharmaseutics many illnesses were cured by placebos. Many researchers found out that beecher was right and that placebos did work and could cure sickness like stomatch pain, depression etc. One of the greatest limitations about this expirement was that Beecher did not give the results on data  and that doctors did not know how patients would respond to the placebo, and instead of being cured they could be more dammaged. IN my opinion i belive placeboes helps since they have no side effects and people have been helped by them intead of being druged will real medications.I also belife that the some of the data provided by Beecher helped save lives and learn more about how it can work. What mostly came to my attention is how psychologist are write humans have the power in their mind its all in the head you can either think possitive and get better results or be negitive and never get better.