The Theories and Treatment behind Depression

Freud suggested/believed that children who are fixed in the oral stage of the psychosexual stages are mostly the children who develop depression; people who are often stuck in the oral stage can have not seen the necessity to move forward to the other stages due to being overly loved in the first few years of childhood.

The main explanation of developing depression according to Freud (a psychodynamic psychologist) is that a loss of a loved one or something very important to them, the loss can be real or something imagined (Lowry 1984) is the main cause for developing depression. However according to Ferster (1974) (a behaviourist) this psychologist believed that when a person no longer gains positive reinforcement, depression can develop. Both approaches believe that depression can be due to a childhood incident i.e. loss or not gaining positive reinforcement.

Loss can lead to a feeling of guilt, negative thoughts and neglect which is then turned into low self esteem which then leads to inwards anger (focussed at them). However neo-Freudian such as Klien & Bowley believes that depression can be caused by removal of love and warmth between the mother and child relationship in the early years of childhood. They believed that if the child had felt that they had not identified with their mother then feel rejected or unloved therefore this has a great impact on their adulthood. The overall explanation from most psychodynamic perspectives is that people develop depression since childhood.

Psychodynamic psychologists use several different methods to help prevent or work through depression since depression cannot be really fully cured. One way to treat depressed people is using dream analysis this is where the person keeps a dia...

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...ised to humans since human participants were not used in the experiment.

There are not many however there are several treatments from the behavioural approach for depression include; cognitive behavioural therapy where the person is sat down with a therapist to think rational through their problems and then look at their actions towards the situation(s), this enables the therapist to talk the person into positively thinking through the person’s problems and trying to resolve them. Another form of treatment includes Systematic Desensitisation (SD) where the person pairs up their problems with techniques of relaxation to simplify the problems and then work through them. People who have a lack of social skills are also able to have social skills training where they work with a therapist on the social skills to get to know more people and not then feel less depressed.