Theories of Depression

Albert Bandura:

Bandura's Social Cognitive learning theory suggested that people are shaped by the interactions between their behaviours, thoughts, and environmental events. He pointed out that depressed people's self-concepts are different from non-depressed people's self-concepts. Depressed people hold themselves respoinsible for all the bad things in their lives an are full of self-blame. Their success tend to be viewed as being caused by external factors outside the depressed person's control. They have low levels of self efficacy, some caused by the constant failures they experience.

Juilian Rotter
Rotter said that internality and externality are different things. Internals tend to attribute outcomes of events to their own control. Externals attribute outcomes of events to external circumstances. The last one will think that it is unlikely for their efforts to bring success, and so are likely to not work hard for any achievements. Peoople with external will think that they have no control over their future, therefore they tend to be more prone to stress and clinical depression.

Martin Seligman
Seligman's theory on "learned helplessness" came as an extension to his research on depression.
He found that learned helplessness to be a psychological condition in which a human being or an animal has learned to act or behave helplessly in a particular situation - usually after experiencing some inability to avoid an adverse situation - even when it actually has the power to change its unpleasant or even harmful circumstance. Seligman saw a similarity with severely depressed patients, and argued that clinical depression and related mental illness result in part from a perceived absence of control over the outcome of a situation.

Aaron Beck

Beck believed that depression is due to unrealistic negative views about the world. Depressed people have a negative cognition in three areas that are placed into the depressive triad. They develop negative views about: themselves, the world, and their future. Beck starts treatment by engaging in conversation with patients about their negative thoughts.

The Lobotomist

The theory of frontal lobotomy is to separate frontal lobe with the rest of your brain and to stop the emotional access for people suffering from mental disorders. The patients (retarded, manic…) were all kept in an asylum without any real treatment. Doctor Walter Freeman was disgusted; he saw them as people who did not require sympathy, but action. A neurologist without surgical training, he was called the Maverick Medical Genius. In 1930’s, they were trying shock therapies; the patients left the table subdued, proving to Freeman that mental disorders come from the brain. In 1936 he made a discovery. He picked up an obscure procedure done by a Portuguese doctor, Egas Moniz, which consisted of actually opening the skull, but with no real understanding of the source of outcome. It showed that the first patient to receive this procedure, after waking, had a placid expression. So Freeman, with the help of doctor James Watts, went on to perfect the technique so he operated on conscious patients to see their reaction. This was called by many as a medical turning point. Even the patients with the most favorable outcomes had problems pursuing actions in daily life. Despite the long side effects, Freeman still performed it on a large number of patients.

Prognosis: after they received the procedure, those without support will be hospitalized permanently, and those with outside support can live without noises in their heads, but still would not be able to completely integrate into society. Freeman called lobotomy “an operation of last resort”; however, he still performed them almost every day.  Many who once supported this operation does not anymore. There is no way that the destruction of the brain can restore patients to any normal state. It was no more subtle than a gunshot to the head. Freeman had little patience for his critiques, and went on saying he was doing something for them other people could not. He was giving the patients a chance to erase the pain. Freeman's most notorious operation was on the ill-fated, Rosemary Kennedy, who was permanently incapacitated by a lobotomy at age 23.

In 1954, a new drug called Thorazine produced results similar to those of lobotomy, except for the fact it does not directly operate on the brain. With the emergence of this pill, Freeman’s opportunities to operate vanished. This drug had effects similar to those of tranquilizers and antipsychotics. So Freeman then moved to Los Angeles and started to look for a new group of people on which to conduct lobotomy. He started to focus on kids with ADD, ADHD…etc. One of his first patients was a 12 years old boy, who according to his stepmom was disobedient. Freeman suggested a change of personality through lobotomy. From this, one can notice how his desperation to operate has altered his perception and now directs this procedure to any possible patient. He lobotomized 19 kids in total, all under the age of 18.

Walter Freeman died from cancer in 1972 at the age of 76. Lobotomy is still performed in extreme cases.

Boy Interrupted Reflexion

        Having bipolar mental disorder is something that will affect a person’s way of living and interaction amongst the society. To have those two extremes of emotions, so distant from each other, is something that one cannot foresee when they will be triggered and the actions they will produce. Bipolar disorder often develops in a person's late teens or early adult years. In the case of Evan Perry, symptoms started showing from early age. He had a very meticulous manner, everything needed to be neat and clean. One of the major reactions he had from his disorder was to think about death and to consider it a route of getting out.

        His doctor then prescribed anti-depressants that consisted of lithium. Lithium brings you to an emotional level that is flat and plain. Evan then requested to go off the medication because he felt lifeless and convinced his parents he was ready. But after a while, although he was aware of his conditions, he couldn’t control it because bipolar is also a disorder of judgment. At the age of 15, he took his life.

        I will never be able to fathom how life is for a bipolar person. Everything that a normal person feels is magnified 1000 times for them and it is really hard to overcome feelings of sadness. Especially since life consists of many ups and downs, how can a bipolar person deal with it? And with medication, is it better to be safe but to feel lifeless?

Internal Assesment - Stroop effect

       

  The Stroop Effect is one of the most-studied phenomena in psychology. This effect shows how the brain deals with conflicting interference. The test is easy to administer, and works in a variety of contexts. This experiment was first conducted in 1935 by J. Ridley Stroop and was first noted in the Journal of Experimental Psychology

          The procedure of this study is that the words will be printed in 3 forms, one all in black ink, then another one in colored ink correspondent to the color the words spell and the last also in color ink but not representing the word spelled. Then to present these words to a certain number of subjects and measure the time they take to finish reading each form. Objective of this experiment is to see how fast is the human reaction time to something that is considered to be a really fast reaction that is barely processed through the brain. This means that when we see the partial beginning of the word, our brains already forms the shape of the word and says it, but the point of this is not to read the words, but the color of the ink of the word. The word themselves has more influence over the mind than the colors. This is due to certain cognitive processes seem automatic in the sense that they do not require effortful thought or seem beyond our conscious control. There is also the consideration of the way you show the words. What if you put colored ink to nonsense words? Would you still have trouble saying them? Probably not. So in order to have a conflicting stimuli for the brain, we right the words of the colors instead of nonsense words.

          There are a couple of reasons behind this. There is one that states that the interference is caused by only one area of the brain is dominating the response of other functional areas. One is the Speed of Processing Theory: the interference occurs because words are read faster than colors are named. The other one is Selective Attention Theory: the interference occurs because naming colors requires more attention than reading words. Another way to explain this is that words are read faster than colors are named, two responses compete to be the actual response produced (this causes the interference), similar to a race to see which will come out first (reading words will always come out first).

The Placebo Effect

          The Placebo Effect is a sort of reaction a patient have when they think they have been treated but are actually not. The most common placebos we see are sugar pills and fake surgeries. It shows the power of the human mind and that sometimes the pain can be reduced by psychological means. It can also be the power of the positive thinking.

          The thought of placebos in modern times came from H.K. Beecher’s study. He looked at 15 clinical trials and found out that 35% of the 1082 patients had satisfactory results being administered with the placebo effect. This is the evidence at the time that supported Beecher’s study. But many after found a lot of wrong issues with his results and data. In 10 of the 15 clinical trials Beecher used earlier, 66.7% of the patients improved as a normal course of their illness, and thus, was not an effect of the placebo. Also in another case, the patients improved after 6 days, but that was a normal result and they would have improved even if they didn’t take anything at all for their cold.

Another important issue with his results was that he only recorded the ones that were successful, and didn’t take into account the patients that deteriorated; therefore there was a misleading direction in the data he presented.

          My personal opinion of the placebo effect after reading all of that is that maybe it does exist, but one shouldn’t depend on it to save a life. Obviously if a patient’s status is critical, it would be unwise and unorthodox to use the placebo effect hoping that it would work. I think the placebo effect works best on more trivial things, such as the pressing of buttons and air conditioning. The mind is a very powerful thing, and perhaps it may trick our body into thinking it is in a condition it is actually not.

Sex and Cultural Differences In Memory

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080220104244.htm

Sex differences in memory:

          There has always been differences between sexes, and their capacity of memory is one two.  The findings of psychologists Agneta Herlitz and Jenny Rehnman in Sweden did determine that sex differences have a lot to do with their episodic memory, a long-term memory build on personal experiences, by which give woman an advantage.
          The differences between the sexes is that women are better in verbal episodic memory taks (ex: remembering words, objects, pictures) and men are better at remembering symbolic non-linguistic things. Another case is that women can remember facial feature better than men, especially those of other females. Also that women recognize familiar smells better. But another thing that affects this is education, which have a big influence on these sex differences.
          Althought the chances that genetically-based differences between the capacity of male and female memory is not clear, results from experiments show that females have the advantage to episodic memory.


http://www.apa.org/monitor/sep05/culture.aspx

Cultural differences in memory:
         

           Throughout a child's life, it is normal for the child not to remember events that happened below the age of 4 or so. This is called "childhood amnesia". But researcher now have discovered the fact that between different cultures, the time when a child can actually remember something is very different, the largest difference up to 2 years apart.
           The main difference that could be found was between american children and asian children. People who grew up in societies that focus more on personal history, like the US, will have earlier childhood memories than those people who grew up in an environment whose value interdependence is placed above those of personal history, like Asia.
           These difference are also explained by the social-interaction model developed by Katherine Nelson. This models says, our autobiographical memories don't develop in a vacuum, but when we were children and we go over past events with adults, enabling us to remember more details.
          There have been many experiments done to understand these slight differences more. Like they tried to compare the earliest memories of Asian-American immigrants to those of native asians and americans and try to figure out a pattern. So overall, this is not a really precise theory, but they are working on it to prove that it is.

Alzheimer's Disease

Alzheimer's disease is losing memories slowly and gradually. No one can identify the causes yet, although the most common trait is that people get this at an old age. When people get this, their identities fade away slowly, causing an incredible amount of pain in the families of the affected. They have nursing homes especially made to treat this, and a place for families to leave their beloved and to not worry about their loved ones being in danger at home, alone.

Although researches keep trying to find something that can stop this, all they seem to be able to find is a way to slow down this process, not stopping it entirely. In the early ages, no one seemed to know about Alzheimer’s disease. The main reason for this is because back then no one seemed to live over the age of 65, therefore the rareness of this disease surfacing. But now that human life has been prolonged to over 65 years old, the need for a cure is more and more demanding.

After reading and watching about this disease, it made me wonder about the mysteries occurring all around us, and I grew apprehensive. What if this disease someday attacks on someone in my family? What if later on I actually get this disease too, and can't remember anything from my childhood to my family? With this question, it lead me to think about  the importance of life. I understand now why people everyone keeps saying “live in the present, not the future”, because later on in life, the present is all you have because you can’t be yourself anymore in the future.