Theories of Depression

Albert Bandura's Social Cognitive learning theory suggests that human beings are shaped by the interactions between their behaviors, thoughts, and environmental events. Human behavior ends up being largely be influences by what the person learns, which may occur by observation, as well as through direct experience. Depressed and non-depressed have different self-concepts. The depressed blame everything that goes wrong on them. They have a very low self esteem because they feel that they are unworthy of living. When something good happens they believe it was cause by an external factor because they aren’t good at all. Bandura also states that at some point these depressed people set their goals to high and do not get close to completing them so they fall into depression. They have low self-efficacy because they believe they are not able to control themselves. Repeated failure reduces self efficacy to a point that these depressed people no longer have goals in life because they believe they won’t reach them.

Julian B. Rotter’s theory of social learning, states that expectations are a crucial factor in social learning. Rotter claims that behavior is determined by two major types of "expectancy": the expected outcome of a behavior and the value a person places on that outcome. He described a general theory of personality with variables based on the ways human beings view their experiences. He believes that when people believe they can affect or influence a situation they feel they have an “internal” control over the event. When people feel they are under the influence of their environment and they can’t do anything to change a situation they have an external locus of control and thins generates a low self-esteem. People with depression have an external locus of control.

Martin Seligman, while working with classical conditioning, discovered new phenomena called Learned Helplessness. He put a dog into a huge box, next to it was another box and both boxes were divided by a small fence. In the boxes wee harmless electric shocks. When there was an electric shock the dog would jump to the other side. Then he did the same but this time put a collar around the dog’s neck to prevent him from passing to the other side. At first the dog would go crazy but after a while he learned that there was nothing to do but lay down and cry. When the same dog was put into the huge box without a collar and the shock would go on he had learned that nothing would prevent his harm so he did not jump to the other side and would lay down and cry. This shows us The theory of learned helplessness was then extended to human behavior, providing a model for explaining depression, a state characterized by a lack of affect and feeling. Depressed people became that way because they learned to be helpless. Depressed people learned that whatever they did is futile. During the course of their lives, depressed people apparently learned that they have no control.

Aaron Beck created a theory called Cognitive Therapy. Beck's cognitive therapy consists of lessoning psychological suffering through therapy. He believes the depressed are angry and take that anger inwards. This decisive approach permits the therapist and practitioner to value the integrative nature of cognitive behavior therapy. If people who are depressed can learn to combat self-doubts in the therapy session, they may be able to apply their newly acquired cognitive and behavioral skills in real-life settings. He strongly believes that depressive people have negative thinking and biased interpretation of events. The key to his therapy is to restructure the distorted beliefs in order to change dysfunctional behaviors.

http://www.helium.com/items/821843-aaron-becks-cognitive-therapy-approach-to-the-treatment-of-depression

http://www.learning-theories.com/social-learning-theory-bandura.html

http://psych.fullerton.edu/jmearns/rotter.htm

http://www.noogenesis.com/malama/discouragement/helplessness.html

Lobotomy

There are nerves that connect the frontal lobes to the rest of the brain. When these nerves are damaged and malfunctioning. There was an idea that once these nerves were severed they would generate into healthy connections. This idea and process came to be known as lobotomy. Some people were lobotomized by backaches, headaches and agon9izing pain that often caused inexplicable pain to the patient. The three common versions of psychosurgery were prefrontal leucotomy, prefrontal lobotomy, and transorbital lobotomy.

Leucotomy involved drilling holes into a patient’s skull in order to access the brain. Once in contact with the brain the surgeon would use a leucotome to discrete the injured nerves. The procedure consisted of sliding a “pencil” into the holes in the skull, into the brain, and using the slide to make the loops come out. The surgeon could sever the nerves by removing “cores” of brain tissue, slide the loop back in, and the operation was complete.

The prefrontal lobotomy also drilled holes into the skull of the patient, but in the upper forehead instead of the top of the skull. Another difference from the leucotomy was that the surgeon used a blade to cut the brain instead of a leucotome. This was more destructive in the way that more injured nerved were cut and severed. Even though this process helped some people it was considered unethical once medicine replaced the risk of going into a lobotomy.

The most unethical and shameful way of psychosurgery was transorbital lobotomy. This was a “blind” operation in which the surgeon was not even aware of what spots he was cutting and what nerves he could have damaged. A sharp, stick-like object would be inserted through the eye socket between the upper lid and the patient’s eye. When the doctor thought (was not sure) he was at about the right spot, he would hit the end of the instrument with a hammer. How can someone go into surgery without knowing whether or not the surgeon will be lucky to hit the right spot? These surgeons had a lot of practice but everyone makes mistakes, so pills were a relief to this risk taking surgery. There were other ways of lobotomy but these were the most known and used.

Despite that these surgeries could cause the life of someone and that they were very risky some people went into surgery having the hope of coming out cured. Some people that thought their children were extremely misbehaved would send them to the lobotomist. This became very unethical until scientists discovered a pill that would do the same work as the lobotomy without risks of failure. There was extensive evidence that psychosurgery was not therapeutic; however operations continued to be practiced for many years. This was because it was considered unprofessional to criticize another physician in public, so many doctors who knew that psychosurgery was a farce did not make their opinions known.

As the right to state an opinion raised people started isolating Lobotomy and soon lobotomists were detested and scorned for their unethical practices.

Bipolar Disorder: Boy Interrupted

Bipolar disorder is a brain disorder that causes unusual shifts in mood and the ability to carry out daily tasks. Due to this disorder, Evan Perry could not live a normal life. When he was a small kid he used to talk about death and rifles, things that 6-year olds don’t think about. The Perry family had already experienced a similar case. Evan’s uncle suffered from bipolar disorder and committed suicide at the age of 21. Evan’s parents said they knew that when a really energetic and happy episode came, a very depressed one would follow. Evan’s life was like a roller coaster, after a high peak came a hard fall. This disorder affected everyone around Evan, his parents, siblings and friends. His first suicide attempt was at a very young age when he was found in his school’s roof. After going to many institutions, he escaped and did crazy things such as breaking into a stranger’s house but he also learned a lot and became more dedicated to cooperate with his teachers. In wellspring, he developed many skills and drank some pills that balanced his mood shifts. The weakness of these pills is that they make people feel as if they have no emotions. The medications controlled his behavior and everyone around him saw his huge improvement. His parents even thought he might be cured but bipolar disorder can not be cured. Evan had thoughts such as “nobody loves me”, “everyone would be better off without me” just like any teenager, the difference was that he had these feelings ten times worse and many more episodes of depression than a normal teenager. Evan tried without his medication but it obviously did not work. After a discussion about homework he left a note and committed suicide at the age of 16. This caused a lot of suffering for Evan’s family but during an episode of depression he could not understand how much this would hurt the people he loved. It was almost as if there were 2 Evans; a really happy one and a depressed one.