PSYCHOLOGICAL FACTORS
There have been a host of different theories put forward by psychologists and psychoanalysts over the years to help to explain the mindset that is present in many depressed people. They are theories that address the way we think and feel about ourselves and others in the light of our experiences. Many psychologists believe that these experiences, usually unhappy or traumatic, happened in childhood, and have set a blueprint for our thought patterns and reactions to those around us for the rest of our lives. You may recognize these theories in relation to your own life.
Loss
Loss is a recurring theme in psychoanalytic theory. You may have experienced loss in your childhood. This does not mean losing a material object, but rather the loss of proper emotional support when you were a child and most vulnerable; for instance not being nurtured properly by your mother. The psychoanalysts believe that if you did not have this reliable support when you needed it, you can find it hard to make successful relationships with others later in life, and you may become prone to depression as a result. It is not always easy to know how we were looked after when we were small, but you might remember not feeling predominantly safe and happy, or being frightened, neglected or criticized by the person caring for you. This sort of treatment might leave you with the feeling that you are not a person worthy of love and respect.
Helplessness
This is another strand to this same theme of loss. Perhaps you were brought up by a mother who, for whatever reason, was not able to make you feel safe and loved, but, being a child, you had no control over the way you were treated. Some psychoanalysts believe that you will react to this unhappiness by giving up and becoming passive and withdrawn. You feel there is nothing you can do to change things, and no point in struggling against what you have found to be the way of the world.
Then if, as an adult, you are faced with a similar feeling of helplessness and grief, such as when someone close to you dies, or your spouse leaves you, or you lose your job, then you react in a similar way, believing that all action is futile, and you withdraw into depression. This mindset can also be brought about by the death of a parent when you were young, especially if the death 'was never properly discussed and explained.
Lack of Positive Reinforcement
This is a theory that addresses how you were treated in childhood too. Perhaps the people close to you never praised you or made you feel that there was anything to look forward to. If this was the case, you might eventually just give up and stop bothering to make any effort, and again become vulnerable to a depressive episode. Maybe every time you attempted something, like painting a picture at school, your mother would laugh at it, or ignore it, or tease you about it. Perhaps your efforts to learn to swim were ridiculed, or your ability to make friends was mocked. You can see how after a while you, as a child, would just stop bothering. You might then unconsciously carry that same pattern into adulthood, making you negative, lacking in ambition, unable to experience pleasure, and therefore vulnerable to depression.
Negative Thought Patterns
These are key to the theory of the cognitive psychologists, who believe that it is the way you think about yourself and your environment, more than what is actually going on in your life, that affects your happiness and the likelihood of you developing depression. They developed what they call the 'cognitive triad', which is made up of three fundamental mindsets. Look at these statements and see if they relate to the way you see the world.
• You have a negative view of yourself; i.e. you have low self-esteem.
• You have a negative view of events that occur in relation to yourself; i.e. you always think the world is against you, even if this has no bearing on the truth.
• You have a negative view of the future; i. e. you don't believe it will ever get any better, something will always go wrong.
Is this how you think. If you do, then the cognitive therapists believe you could be the victim of inadequate nurturing when you were a child. Perhaps your mother or father constantly told you that you were stupid, clumsy, lazy, ugly, generally unlovable, and you believed them. Now you have absorbed this distorted information and it colors everything you do and the way you deal with everyone you come in contact with as an adult. So you are always waiting for the insult, you then overreact and treat your friends and acquaintances with paranoia and suspicion, which in turn alienates them, and this distorted thought pattern becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because people then don't find you lovable. The end result? Depression again.
Trying Too Hard to Be Good and Perfect
Doing this because you believe that you are intrinsically worthless and bad is another mindset that can lead to depression. Trying to be perfect is inevitably doomed to failure, no matter who you are, but many of us do this in an attempt to negate the horrible feelings we have about ourselves inside. So perhaps you are always charming and helpful and there for everyone, always the one who does the extra school run or takes the difficult project, makes all the costumes for the school play and gives everyone presents for no reason. Nothing wrong with that, you might say, and no, there isn't, except if you are doing it in a desperate attempt to be what you consider a 'good' person because your childhood careers have instilled in you how bad you really are. This 'trying to be good' mindset is a terrible strain and will often lead in the end to depression.
These different mindsets identified by psychoanalytic theory can be very hard to live with, not least because so many of us are unaware that we think and feel this way. You might know that you don't feel good about yourself, bur it is another leap to understand why you feel this way or how it is affecting your life. If you think that there are issues here that you relate to, it may be a good idea to get professional help from a qualified therapist because our internal messages about ourselves and others seem to be of prime importance in mood disorders such as depression.
The theories all point to our childhood blueprint as key to the way we feel about ourselves. A perfect childhood may be something of a myth, but the majority of us received nurturing that was good enough. Psychological research suggests that for the rest of us, however, it is the lack of proper safety and respect during childhood that might tip us towards depression in adult life.
