Which psychological factors make you susceptible to depression?

Various psychological factors can increase your susceptibility to depression. They may be the reason why you develop depression. These factors can be either:

• External psychological factors (past, present and environmental)
• Internal psychological factors

Which external factors increase the risk of depression?

External factors from your past can make you susceptible to depression. They will often date back to your childhood.

Two things in particular can make you susceptible to depression:

• Poor contact with parents or early loss of a parent through death or divorce
• Emotionally "cold" upbringing, i.e. a lack of nurturing and attention to needs

Adults who suffer from depression are around ten times more likely than healthy people to recall an upbringing characterized by a lack of nurturing and attention to needs.

You might think that people suffering from depression will remember their upbringing as unemotionally attached because their mood is negatively affected. However, studies have found that they describe their upbringing in the same way once they are in good health again. Witnesses to their upbringing also confirm that it lacked emotion and or nurturing.

Therefore there is no doubt that a lack of emotion and nurturing can make people more susceptible to depression in later life.

Are there any other external factors that increase the risk of depression?

The following external factors can also trigger depression:

• Physical and sexual assault
• Conflict and turbulence in the home
• Parents who used a sense of shame as an aid to upbringing
• Parents who openly favoured other siblings
• Parents who made unreasonable demands on their children, for example, in relation to performance at school

Are there any present-day external factors that increase the risk of depression?

There may be external factors that burden and "damage" you over a long period but these present-day factors will not trigger depression on their own. They will only do this if you are already susceptible.

Here are some long-term factors that increase the risk of developing depression:

• Emotionally unrewarding or conflict-ridden relationship with your partner
• Stressful divorce
• Stressful or unrewarding working environment
• Long-term unemployment
• Loneliness

In some cases these external factors can spark off a bout of depression

Does loneliness increase the risk of depression?

You are at greater risk of developing depression if you don't have somebody close to you who you can talk to about everything.

Superficial acquaintances cannot replace that one person who is very close to you. If you have only a large number of superficial acquaintances, you run a greater risk of developing depression. You need to have somebody to talk to about your personal problems.

To the top

Can personality traits cause depression?

There are four psychological personality traits that can increase the risk of developing depression:

• General nervousness
• Deeply negative way of thinking
• Passive pattern of behaviour
• Perfectionist and obsession type

General nervousness

If you are emotionally volatile and vulnerable, you are at greater risk of getting depressed. In other words, you are:

• Touchy
• Emotionally sensitive

If you have a tendency to react with strong negative feelings, you may often suffer a set back emotionally if you are exposed to external stresses such as a divorce or losing your job.

Your tendency to be nervous depends on both inheritance and environment. Nervousness, like other personality traits, is due to a combination of your genes and your personal development.

Deeply negative way of thinking

A negative way of thinking means that you:

• Tend to think in a negative and pessimistic way
• Think particularly negative thoughts whenever you encounter a setback

There are three main signs of a negative way of thinking:

• A tendency to take the blame for bad things
• A tendency to believe that bad things dominate your existence
• A belief that things won't ever get better - you expect the bad things to persist for the rest of your life

A new American study has shown that young people with a negative way of thinking are 16 times more at risk of depression than other people.

What is a passive pattern of behaviour?

A passive pattern of behaviour is where you react to setbacks by:

• Freezing
• Giving up on resolving problems
• Running from problems

The risk of getting depressed is reduced if you learned during childhood (or later) how to resolve problems. One way of resolving problems is to talk about them.

If you tend to react passively, this may be the result of a negative way of thinking. Maybe you often say to yourself:

• "I just can't do anything right"

The reason why you think like this may be that you haven't learned how to resolve life's problems in an active and constructive manner.

There are other personality traits that increase the risk of depression:

Low self-esteem

• Unstable self-esteem (mood is easily affected by life’s ups and downs)
• A high degree of emotional dependence on other people
• A low degree of trust in other people

To the top