Can psychological factors prolong a depression?
Psychological factors such as thoughts, feelings and behaviour can prolong a depression.
When you feel down, your memory is focused on the negative aspects of your life. You tend to recall negative memories more readily than positive memories.
For example, you may feel that your life so far has been a waste of time. This distortion of your memory intensifies and prolongs your depression.
Behavioural changes
Your behaviour will change if you are depressed. Unfortunately these changes may result in the deterioration of your relationships with other people. Your behaviour may change in the following ways:
- You may become more passive and more negative in your behaviour towards others
- You may encounter fresh problems on account of poor relationships with, say, members of your family and colleagues at work
These changes in your relationships with other people may make them react negatively to you. This is obviously a problem because they should be comforting and encouraging you. Instead they distance themselves and you become more convinced of the awfulness of your life. This may lead you even deeper into depression.
These two factors make for a vicious circle of:
- Negative thoughts and feelings
- Negative relationships with others
Ultimately these negative thoughts, feelings and relationships will create two separate vicious circles:
- An internal vicious circle
- An external vicious circle
The internal vicious circle
The internal vicious circle is made up of the negative thoughts about life that you tend to carry around with you and make you vulnerable.
During periods of setbacks this internal vicious circle will result in severe dejection.
This dejection will amplify your negative thoughts, and these negative thoughts will in turn intensify your dejection, and so on.
The external vicious circle
The external vicious circle increases your tendency to react passively or negatively to other people. This means that you will push your nearest and dearest away from you. This will make you feel lonelier. The lonelier you feel, the more depressed you will get.
These vicious circles can remain in place even when the external factors that originally caused them (like a divorce or dismissal from your job) are long gone. This means that both you and the people around you will have forgotten what it was that caused the depression in the first place.
You can do something about it!
The following can trigger and sustain depression:
So the most effective form of psychological treatment for depression is:
- Cognitive behavioural therapy
Cognitive behavioural therapy is all about analysing and changing inappropriate ways of thinking and behaving.