All articles tagged with "Depression"
Behavioral Activation is a treatment for depression that works by reversing the withdrawal-avoidance cycle without explicitly targeting thoughts. Explore the Lewinsohn model, the Jacobson component analysis, and the Dimidjian RCT that showed BA matched antidepressants for severe depression.
In the 1960s, Aaron Beck was treating depressed patients using psychoanalysis — free association, dream interpretation, uncovering unconscious hostility. Then he started asking his patients what they were thinking during sessions. What he found was not repressed aggression. It was a stream of rapid, specific, self-defeating thoughts his patients barely noticed they were having: 'I'm stupid,' 'I'll fail,' 'No one likes me.' Beck had discovered automatic thoughts — and with them, an entirely different theory of what depression was and how to treat it.
Martin Seligman and Steven Maier gave dogs inescapable electric shocks in 1967. When later placed in a box where escape was easy, the dogs did not try — they lay down and accepted the shocks. Control dogs with escapable shocks learned to escape immediately. Learned helplessness: the experience of uncontrollable outcomes teaches organisms that their actions are futile — and that lesson transfers even when it is no longer true.