Psychopathology

Psychopathology

Specification:

The cognitive approach to explaining and treating depression: Beck’s negative triad and Elli’s ABC model; cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT), including challenging irrational thoughts.

Psychopathology

Clinical characteristics

Complete task 1 on the depression worksheet.

Read p. 21-23 of the psychopathology booklet and complete the table.

Cognitive approach

• Cognitive psychologists study mental processes.

• Mental processes cannot be observed and measured directly.

• Cognitive psychologists construct models of mental processes.

• These models are representations of mental processes

Cognitive approach

• The mind is an information processor.

• How we process information causes feelings and behaviour.

• It’s not what happens that is important but how we think about what has happened.

• Mental disorders like depression are caused by the way certain people think about events, themselves and their future.

Cognitive approach

The output is the behavioural response.

The information once encoded can be processed.

The input comes from the environment via the senses and is encoded by the individual.

OutputProcessingInput

Cognitive approach

Cognitive approach

• Schemas are important to how the mind processes information.

• Schemas develop over time.

• The human mind constructs schemas for everything: experiences, knowledge, skills and actions.

Cognitive approach

The output is the behavioural response.

The information once encoded can be processed.

The input comes from the environment via the senses and is encoded by the individual.

OutputProcessingInput

Cognitive approach

• Schemas help us to understand the world around us and ourselves.

• Schemas are important to the way the cognitive approach explains why some people develop depression.

• Beck thought that schema based information processing was an important cause of depression:

• Self-schema.

• World schema.

• Future schema.

Cognitive approach: Beck

Beck evaluation: strengths

• Lots of research backs up the cognitive approach as an explanation of why people develop depression.

• Bourey et al (2001) found that people with depression did think negatively about events and experiences and feel hopeless about the future.

Beck evaluation: strengths

• Cognitive behaviour therapy based on the cognitive approach is successful in treating depression.

• This suggests that the way some people process information about themselves, the world around them, and their future does play a role in causing depression.

Beck evaluation: limitations

• A lot of the research that backs up beck’s cognitive explanation of depression is correlational.

• Negative thinking may be a symptom of depression not a cause of depression.

Beck evaluation: limitations

• The cognitive approach and Beck’s negative triad cannot explain all types of depression.

• It can explain major depression but not bipolar affective disorder.

• It cannot explain endogenous depression: a severe type of depression that can be life threatening and has no obvious cause such as a negative pattern of thinking.

Beck evaluation: limitations

• It cannot explain all the symptoms of depression.

• It cannot explain psychotic depression: symptoms include hallucinations and delusional beliefs.

• The cognitive approach and Beck’s negative triad cannot be a complete explanation of depression.

Beck evaluation: limitations

• The cognitive approach can raise some ethical issues.

• Bad things happen to good people.

• The way they think about their situation may not be ‘faulty’ but realistic.

• To tell people in a bad situation that they need to change the way they think about that and not change the situation can be damaging.