Tracy's Depression

Application of psychological theory and research to understand depression

Tracy, a 25-year old woman who has recently become pregnant and has consequently been abandoned by her boyfriend Issac, was referred to counselling service with the help of her friends. She was diagnosed as having depression with emotional, behavioural and physiological symptoms such as feelings of emptiness, social withdrawal, weight loss, insomnia and a diminished ability to concerntrate.

An approach to analyse the possible causes of Tracy’s depression is through Beck’s cognitive model (as cited in Watkins, 1997), which describes how individuals perceive their life events affect their emotional, behavioural and physiological repsonses. According to Beck’s cognitive

Read and Sanders (2010) point out that diagnoses can have advantages such as aiding communication during treatment, bringing reassurance to sufferers, and helping to allocate funding and treatment based on the severity of the problem. In Tracy’s case, a diagnosis could have these benefits. Not only could it help Tracy understand what happened to her, it could also provide her with an explanation for her symptoms. Both the therapist and Tracy could gain a better understanding of her problem according to the diagnosis; thereby an effective therapeutic progress could be achieved. In addition, a diagnosis could provide Tracy with a feeling of relief about her current situation and she may gain confidence about recovery. Tracy could also benefit from government funding for treatment after being diagnosed as having depression. This could reduce her financial burden for treatment and give her a sense of support, which can be critically important for her

Read and Sanders (2010) argue that a downside of diagnoses is pinpointing problems solely in individual but neglecting social causes which may reduce one’s hope for recovery. In Tracy’s case, the removal from her birth parents and placement in the foster care system, which was a government intervention, could constitute an external cause, a natural reaction to which could be developing feelings of depression. In contrast, adiagnosis could make Tracy attribute her problems to internal causes such as genetic diseases or an illness that has been developed since she was young. This may undermine her confidence in changing her distressing situation. As well as this, diagnostic labels can lead to stigma for people have mental health problems (Read and Sanders, 2010). Tracy may feel discriminated against with the label of depression and feel alienated by other people, which may exacerbate her current symptoms. In addition, a famous study conducted in 1975 by David Rosenhan (as cited in Rosenberg and Lambert, 2014) cast doubts on the reliability and validity of diagnoses. Read and sanders (2010) argue that one’s reported symptoms cannot be defined conclusively as any one distinct mental health issue. They also claim that a diagnosis cannot predict how the affected person will respond to the treatment given the unconvincing reliability and validity of the diagnosis. In Tracy’s case, a diagnosis for her could be false and