The cognitive processes such as thinking, imagining and other related mental aspects play a vital role in the infusion of depressants in an individual’s life. The sufferer starts believing in negative self and plans his actions around it. The depressed person traps himself into a self-fabricated labyrinth, develops self-rejection and finds himself alienated from the society. This turns into serious hostility towards society. The person starts feeling hatred towards others and constructs negative self-schemes to govern his further activities.
Depression substantially attenuates a person’s ability of handling stress and problem solving approach. A depressed person often presumes a situation to be worse for him and lacks the confidence to tackle the problem. This is largely due to his experience of consecutive failures or setbacks which he has been through. Thus he starts recollecting cues from his past and develops a “giving up” attitude. Psychologically this is termed as “learned helplessness”, according to which a person accepts his incompetence and deters himself from getting into significant life affairs. The person loses his self-conceit and his self–esteem gets impaired. If this feeling extends to other spheres of life, then the depression is generalized across situations. The reasoning power weakens and his interpretations are extremely biased. The victim makes ambiguous co-relations and inter-linkages between several distinguished phenomena. He perceives himself as a loser and all his thoughts are dominated by these negative views of self.
Many well known psychologists consider depression as a thought disorder i.e. depressed people experience great distortions of logical thought. These distortions include:
Arbitrary Inference: - This refers to making inferences or drawing conclusion based on very little or no evidence. This tendency leads people to take hasty decisions that may prove to be disastrous. The chain of these trivial inferences often results into societal detachment.
Overgeneralization: - This means generalization based on very little evidence. This particular tendency abstracts the individual to move ahead in his life as all his steps are pre-decided in accordance with his schema.
Selective Abstraction: - It involves drawing conclusions primarily based on one detailed aspect of a situation. This hampers the individuals multidimensional thought process and the person constructs illogical correlations. Sufferer’s act becomes highly deterministic based on his prejudice.
Magnification and Minimization: - It comprises of manipulation with the given information. The depressed person either exaggerates or limits the significance of information. This may result into unconscious violation of any particular rule by the patient.
One of the most striking facts observed recently is that the depressed persons sometimes assess themselves more accurately than the non-depressed persons. During the course of treatment the depressed person gets inflated self-perception. To stave off depression, the depressed person adopts a “warm glow” i.e. intense focusing on strengths and virtues rather than weaknesses. In other words the person tends to develop an exaggerated unrealistic self that is full of self-confidence. Hence precaution must be taken in order to control the situation later, as recurrence of a depressive episode may be more painful and dangerous for the patient.
