Zusammenfassung der Ressource
Mood Disorders
- Diagnosing Depression
- depressed mood, reoccuring thoughts of death,
faigue or loss of energy everyday, insomnia or
hyposomnia everyday, feelings of worthlessness or
excessive or innapropriate guilt, diminished ability to
think or concentrate, diminished interest or pleasure in
most things, singnificant weight loss
- five or more symptoms in a
2 week period for unipolar depression
- Bipolar depression- symptoms of both depression and
mania must be experiences, patients are unaware that
anything wrong in the manic phase and four or more
symptoms are experience
- Cognitive symptoms- delusional ideas, auditory or visual
hallucinations, makes reckless or irrational decisions
showing little regard for the effects on others, though
patterns are severely disrupted
- Emotional symptoms- feeling
euphoric, strongly denies there is
anything wrong, may become
irritable with those around them that
try to interfere and shows a lack of
guilt
- Behavioural symptoms- a marked
increase in work, sexual or social
activity, may become more talkative or
speak faster, an inability to stay still of
quiet, can be a loss of social inhibition
and may become reckless
- Physical symptoms- sleep very
little and have lots of energy
- Biological
- Genetics
- Family studies
- Winokur (1995) rate of unipolar
depression was 10.4% in 1st
degree relatives of probates
compared to the 4.9% in controls
- Weissman et al (1987) found that
approximately 50% of the offspring
of depressives display depressive
symptoms
- Gershon (1990) found that the rates if
depression in 1st degree relative
ranged from 7% and 30%
- The younger the person is
that is diagnosed the higher
the chance that a relative also
has depression
- Weissman (1984) found relatives of
people diagnosed with depression
before the age of 20 have an 8X
greater chance of being diagnosed
themselves
- genes may only
increase the
susceptibility that
the person has to
develop depression
- Twin studies
- McGuffin et al (1996) found
that there was a 46%
concordance rate for MZ
twins and 20% for DZ twins
- Twin studies cannot
rule out the
environment like
adoption studies can
- Adoption studies
- Prince et al (1968) found
concordance rates of 68% for DZ
twins that were raised together and
67% when raised apart.
- Neurochemical
- depression is caused by a deficiency
in monoamines (noradrenaline,
dopamine and serotonin )
- Lemonick (1997)
drugs used to treat
depression raise
levels of
noradrenaline and
serotonin
- Cooper at al (1988) Resopine, used
to treat high blood pressure led to a
reduction in the availability of
noradrenaline leading to depressive
symptoms
- Structure and function
- the limbic system and frontal
lobes are implicated in
depression
- CT scans and MRI scans have found enlarged
ventricles and decreased volume in the
hypocampus and basal ganglia
- PET scans have found
changed in cerebral blood flow
in the pre frontal cortex,
amygdala and thalamus
- Cognitive
- Beck's Dysfunctional Thinking Theory
- Negative self schema: the information
that we take in will confirm the negative
belief and ignore evidence of the contrary
- Schema: can
process info
selectively and fast
due to expectation
- The triad of impairments: refers to the
automatic negative cognitions that a person
prone to depression emphasises about
themselves, the world and the future
- Faulty information processing:
individuals selectively attend
interpretations and overgeneralise and
magnify adversity
- Dysfunctional thinking only causes depression if there
has been a critical life event
- Cognitive biases
- Minimisation: bias towards minimising success
- Magnification: bias towards magnifying even trivial failures
- Negative abstraction: bias towards
focusing on only the nagative aspects of
life and ignoring the wider picture
- All or nothing: see life in terms of black
and white, you are either a success or a
failure, there is not middle ground
- Behavioural
- Ferster (19974) when a
persons responses are no
longer positively reinforced it
can lead to depression e.g.
the death of a relative
- Learned Helplessness Theory: Seligman
(1974) suggested that people suffer from
depression because they have developed a
learned belief that they are not in control of
their own lives. Deficits occur in different areas
- Lewinson and Gotlib (1995) suggested that a
failure to recieve positive reinforcement leads
to a reduction in effort and then to even less
reinforcement
- the disorder may lead to the concern of others and
therefore reinforcing depressive behaviour
- Psychodynamic
- potential to become depressed is created in the
oral stage who suffer from low self esteem and
become overly dependent on others
- following the loss of a loved one the person goes through a
stage of introjection, this process results in the person taking
into themselves any negative feeling towards the loved one
and resenting their desertion and feeling guilty
- the following period of mourning allows for a
separation to be made, in overly dependent people
the emotional bonds cannot be broken and anger
continues to be turned inwards, resulting in
depression