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Essay on The Cognitive Model of Depression
The standard cognitive model of depression describes negative thinking in depression at three levels: negative automatic thoughts, thinking errors or biases and underlying beliefs or assumptions. Firstly, many of the spontaneous or automatic thoughts of people with depression are manifestly negative. Such negativity focuses on the self, the world and the future: the negative cognitive triad. People suffering from acute depression tend to see themselves as defective or inadequate, and see the world as presenting them only with insuperable obstacles and difficulties (Garrison et al 1998).
They see such problems persisting indefinitely into the future and are pessimistic to the point of hopelessness and perhaps suicidal wishes. When these negative automatic thoughts come to mind, they trigger feelings of misery and despair or exacerbate an existing low mood state. Negative emotions or low mood can prime these negative thoughts, making them more likely to come to mind and more believable when they do. As low mood primes the negative thoughts, which then further exacerbate low mood, a vicious circle is set up whereby the person’s mood can spiral downwards. This can also lead to procrastination and inactivity, which further feed into the vicious circle.
Cognitive Biases
The negative content of thinking manifest in these negative automatic thoughts results in part from certain biases or distortions in the processing of information. These biases include all-or-nothing or ‘black and white’ thinking, personalization and jumping to conclusions. Dichotomous or ‘black and white’ thinking is central, whereby the person sets unrealistically high standards for their own performance (Garrison et al 1998). Depressed people frequently personalize any negative outcomes, by assuming the blame for things that go wrong or seeing personal rejection in any uncomfortable social situation.
Negative biases may also be in the form of arbitrary inferences, where the depressed person jumps to the most negative conclusion about a situation in the absence of any evidence................
