Self-reinforcement

Thomas Nielsen, lecturer, MA in Psychology

A lot of the thoughts, feelings and behaviour, which occur in connection with depression, can also be contributory to prolonging and strengthening the course of the depression, hence a self-increasing effect.

Feelings and memory

If you feel down, it can effect your memory in a way that only makes you think of negative rather than positive memories. You might for example have the feeling that life until now has been drab even though it actually hasn't been the case. This distortion of your memory strengthens and prolongs your depression.

In trials, where healthy trial subjects were made to feel depressed through hypnosis and chemical substances, it has been proven that the feelings distort the memory. The trial subjects, who were made depressed "artificially", remembered their past in a more negative way than they did a few hours earlier, when they were in their normal mood.

Behavioural change

If you are depressed, a behavioural change occurs, which unfortunately can mean that your relation with others deteriorates. Because your behaviour is changed by your becoming more passive and more "negative" in your behaviour towards others, your relationship with, for example, members of your family or work colleagues deteriorate.

Your negative behaviour towards others also causes them to react negatively towards you. This is of course a problem, as they distance themselves from you instead of comforting and encouraging you. You therefore become even more convinced about your life's misery and that can mean that you slide deeper into depression.

Vicious circles

These two circumstances create a self-reinforcing "vicious circle" of negative thoughts and feelings and negative relationships with others. This eventually creates two vicious circles, one inner and one outer circle.

The inner vicious circle is the negative thoughts about life, which constantly prevails as a thought pattern in you and which makes you vulnerable. During periods of adversity, the inner vicious circle causes you to feel severely down. This dejection increases your negative thoughts, your negative thoughts increase the dejection and so it continues.

The outer vicious circle increases your tendency to react passively or negatively towards others. Your thereby push the people closest to you away from you, which means that you become more lonely. And when you become more lonely, you become more depressed etc.

Cognitive therapy

The vicious circles can continue long after the outer triggering causes of the depression have ceased (such as a divorce or losing your job). This means that you and the people around you have forgotten what it was that started the depression!

But you can do something in that situation. Cognitive behavioural therapy is a form of psychotherapy which actually is about analyzing and changing inappropriate forms of thought and behaviour. This form of therapy is therefore the most effective psychological treatment method for depressions.