Thinking

Depression affects a person's ability to remember, think, and work. For instance, people who are depressed have much greater difficulty remembering random information than people who are not depressed. When given new material, they have more difficulty connecting it with what they know already. The information does not get organized in ways that help it get learned or recalled.

Depression causes people emotional pain, makes a person's behavior self-defeating, and drives others away from them. On top of all that, if a person wants to regain self-esteem by accepting a challenge, they're handicapped at the outset because they have more trouble remembering and absorbing information.
Distorted Perception and Bad Logic

Aaron Beck, a well-known psychologist, is a leading researcher on how depression affects thought processes and how the way a person thinks affects their depression. Beck has identified three patterns of distorted thinking that are common to many people with depression. Depressed people clearly differ from others in the following ways:

1. The Self. The depressed person is his own worst critic. He sees himself as defective, inadequate, or deprived. He thinks that he deserves unhappiness because of his flaws, or else that because of his deficits he is unable to achieve happiness. He tends to underestimate and criticize himself, and he lacks hope because he believes he is missing the essential character traits that lead to fulfillment.

2. Present Reality. The depressed person interprets interactions with the everyday world-people, events, and inanimate objects-differently from other people. He sees the demands the world makes on him as impossible to attain. He interprets his interactions with the world as representing defeat or deprivation, whereas an outside observer would see some successes in the failures, some gifts among the rejections.

3. Future Expectations. The depressed person has a negative expectation for the future. He doesn't anticipate relief from his present suffering, and when he considers trying something new, he expects to fail.

Errors In Logic and Judgment

Because depressives have very distorted perception, they are consistently making errors in logic and judgment. Some of the most important errors are:

1. Overgeneralizing, or the tendency to assume that if it's true once, it's likely to be true all the time. Just because a person performs poorly on one test doesn't mean they will continue to do badly, but the depressive is likely to think so.

2. Selective abstraction consists of focusing on a detail taken out of context, ignoring other evidence, and drawing conclusions on the basis of the detail. For example, if a depressive gives a speech, they are likely to remember the awkward pauses, the questions they don't feel they answered adequately, rather than the 90 percent of the speech that went well. Unless the depressive was to watch themselves, they are likely to judge the entire experience on the basis of a few negative details.

3. Excessive responsibility. Depressed people tend to assume that they are responsible for bad things that happen, while good things are caused by others, by luck, or other factors which can't be controlled. When their car skids on an icy road, the depressive thinks, "I shouldn't have been driving today," rather than, "The road is icy."

4. Self-reference. Depression leads to a negative self-consciousness, a tendency to magnify one's own part in things, even to believe that you are the center of attention. The depressed child in the school play thinks that all eyes are on her, that any mistake she makes will be the talk of the town.

5. Catastrophizing. Depressed people are well known for always expecting the worst.

6. Dichotomous thinking refers to the tendency to see everything as good or bad, black or white. The depressive puts himself in the bad category, people he admires in the good. He doesn't see faults or weaknesses in those he admires, nor does he see strengths in himself. He extends this kind of thinking to include those who seem to like him, deciding that they must be in the bad category, too-uninformed or ignorant if they are stupid enough to like him.

It should be obvious that these kinds of cognitive errors are self-fulfilling prophecies. For example, if you expect to do badly on tests, your chances of doing well are diminished. The negative expectation may mean that you won't prepare, that you'll be more anxious and that you'll have difficulty concentrating and remembering. If you only selectively remember the negative aspects of your speeches, you are more likely to avoid making speeches, feel under stress when you do make them, and communicate that stress to your audience. Expecting the worst all the time can lead to one never really trying. Dichotomous thinking means never being able to evaluate oneself as highly as others.

Beck also identified a number of false beliefs that tend to set people up for depression:

1. In order to be happy, I have to be successful in whatever I undertake.
2. To be happy, I must be accepted by all people at all times.
3. If I make a mistake, it means I am inept.
4. If somebody disagrees with me, it means he doesn't like me.
5. My value as a person depends on what others think of me.
6. I can't live without you.

There are many others. They may seem so blatantly illogical that no one could admit feeling this way. But we don't arrive at these beliefs through logic and experience, rather through making assumptions that fit with our own guilt and self-blame. These beliefs are pervasive and insidious in their effects on our lives. We can't possibly be accepted by everyone at all times.

Some people will want exactly opposite things from us, and we must choose one or the other or run the risk of alienating both. If we feel that we can't live without another person, we're almost guaranteed to scare him or her away from us. If we feel that everyone who disagrees with us doesn't like us, we are likely to distort our own principles and values for the sake of pleasing others, and then we won't think much of ourselves.

On the next page we will examine the Relationships of Depressants.