The Negative Cognitive Triad
The two pioneers in Cognitive theories are Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck. Whereas Albert Ellis was concerned more with the ineffectiveness of antidepressants to cure depression, Aaron Beck was concerned with the lack of consideration of thoughts and feelings as contributing factors in depression. The behaviorists of the era looked at behavior being shaped by actions. Once an action was repeated several times it became a habit. That explained addictions to a certain point, but it could not explain why people were driven to addictions in the first place. The early cognitive theorists such Ellis and Beck needed a more comprehensive theory; one that would include thoughts and feelings as motivational factors for our behaviors. Today we have also a combination of cognitive behavior theories and therapies for depression and other mental illnesses.
Cognitive behavioral theory is among the group of psychotherapies, which address environmental concerns. They are excellent therapies, which prove quite affective in treating depression. Cognitive theories suggest that people learn behaviors from their social interactions with people and from the experiences they have had from the environment at large. These experiences can be maladaptive and that is the cause among depressed people. People exhibiting depression symptoms tend to have a very pessimistic view of life, where everything that can go wrong will go wrong. Thus they tend to misinterpret events by continually putting a negative spin on them and they see situations as worse then they really are. They also blame themselves for all the misfortunes life can hand out.
Dr. Beck stipulated that it was the negative thoughts that caused the depression symptoms and the more negative the thoughts the more severe the depression symptoms will be. Dr. Beck stated that there are there main schema (universal thoughts or core beliefs), which occupies the thoughts of a depressed person, and this schemas are, “there is something wrong with me, I am defective, or inadequate, no matter what I do I will fail at it, and the future is hopeless. Dr. Beck called this the Negative Cognitive Triad. We can take the example of losing a job to explain the Negative Cognitive Triad. A person who loses his job and is exhibiting the Negative Cognitive Triad will blame the layoff on himself, he will feel that he failed at the job and that is why he was fired. He will then feel that every job he ever gets will end in failure, and why bother trying for another job it is totally hopeless. A person who is not depressed on the other hand, will look at other factors such the state of the economy, the employer having to lay off people for economic reasons, and more. These individuals may feel very disappointed about losing their job as it is not something to be happy about, but they will clean up their resume and go out and look for another job.
Dr. Beck also talked about faulty information processing. Basically what that means is that people suffering from a depressive disorder will only look at information, which supports their negative view of the situation and ignore any other information to the contrary. This is also known as selective processing. In the previous example about losing a job, depressed people will blame the layoff on their own inadequacies and not on other factors like the economy and business cutbacks. They will maximize the negative and minimize the positive in situations. For example, the depressed person given a positive work review would more than likely find fault with the review just so that it could not be perfect. For example, he might say, “If I was really that good of a worker I would not be fired, this review is just a nice kiss off,” or, “yeah I got a great review but that project was easy anyone could have done it.” They will still have negative thoughts even when positive events occur. Again using the layoff example, if per chance the depressed person is called back he may then say something like, “oh yeah they call me back now, but I know they will lay me off again.”
Related Depression Posts