Outline of psychological explanations
Freud’s original psychodynamic view related the origins of depression back to the oral stage – the first stage of development, the stage when there is great dependency on the caregiver. When the individual’s needs are not met during this stage, they become fixated and tend to become excessively dependent on other people. This dependency makes them vulnerable to depression. They spend a lot of time and energy seeking the love and approval of others and are angry when their needs are not met. If a loss occurs later in life such as bereavement or loss of a job, the individual feels the loss very intensely and may regress to the oral stage. The individual feels anger at being deserted, but this is unacceptable to the superego and so the anger is turned inward and the individual is unaware that their feelings are connected with their parents as this all occurs on an unconscious level.
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Beck’s cognitive theory claims that depression is a disorder of thought rather than of mood. The depressed individual thinks about themselves pessimistically. As a result of early childhood experiences, the individual develops negative schemas or core beliefs that lead to negative automatic thoughts (NATS). These are habitual critical and derogatory ways of thinking over which the individual has little control and they result in the individual applying faulty logic to situations. Beck calls theses cognitive biases or distortions. They include the minimising positive aspects of a situation and maximising negative ones.
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TOTAL = 244 words
10 MINS
Evaluation of psychological explanations
Psychological explanations for depression are varied and suggest a non-biological cause for low mood in individuals. While it is feasible to assume that childhood experiences may have an influence on whether an individual becomes depressed later in life, it is difficult to find empirical evidence for some of the psychodynamic theories about this. For example, Freud’s idea about the importance of the oral stage is extremely difficult to test scientifically. However, it does have links with Bowlby’s theory of attachment which states that separations in childhood and insecure parent-child attachments could lead to later depression.
There is also some evidence for the idea that a set of dependent personality traits are often found in people suffering with depression. However, as these traits seem to fluctuate with the level of depression they may be a result of the depression rather than the cause of it.
Bifulco et al (1987) found some support for the idea that the loss of a parent can be linked to later depression. However, not everyone who loses a parent becomes depressed and not all people who are depressed have lost a parent so there must be other factors involved.
There have also been studies which have shown that depressed people show more anger than controls who are not experiencing depression, but this is overt anger rather than anger turned inward and so does not fully relate to the psychodynamic explanation.
A key problem with Freud’s ideas is that many of the concepts he uses such as the superego are rather abstract and cannot be defined well enough for a testable hypothesis to be formed. This makes his theories irrefutable. It does not necessarily mean that his ideas are wrong, only that they cannot be rigorously tested.
However, Freud’s theory as laid out in his book Mourning and Melancholia was significant because it emphasised the role of early experience in creating a vulnerability to depression which is also at the heart of the cognitive theory.
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Cognitive theories of depression have been extremely influential and have stimulated huge amounts of research that have helped us to understand the disorder and how to treat it. Cognitive therapies are generally very helpful to people with depression which in itself, supports the explanation. However, while various studies have shown that depressed people do show more negative thinking than non depressed people,
there is still some debate about whether negative thinking causes depression or whether a low mood brings about negative thinking. It seems likely that negative thinking maintains the disorder, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that it is the explanation for why the depression began in the first place.
Prospective studies would be needed in order to be sure that negative thinking precedes a depressive episode and this would be very difficult to design and carry out from a methodological point of view as it would mean following people over a long period of time and would rely on subjective and detailed accounts of their thoughts. From a practical point of view this would be very difficult.
Other theories have links with the cognitive approach such as Seligman’s learned helplessness theory and Abramson’s misattribution hypothesis none of which can account for the gender difference found in depression as there is no evidence to suggest that women are more vulnerable to cognitive distortions or learned helplessness than men.
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TOTAL 556 words
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TOTAL AO1 + AO2 = 244 + 556 = 800