15.3: Mood Disorders and Suicide

Peopletrophize when they predict terrible events, such as contracting a life-threatening illness from turning a doorknob.

An inability to regulate or control negative emotions together with an inability to generate positive emotions or feelings of well-being may contribute to catastrophizing and to a constant feeling of being on edge with worry.

People who are anxious tend to interpret situations in a negative light.

They need to write down the words that sound the same but have different meanings.
In these studies, they've used pairs of vowels in which one meaning is threatening and the other is nonthreatening.

Think of the times you felt unwell when you stood up quickly or when your heart raced after you climbed the stairs.

You probably thought the physical symptoms were harmless.
People with high anxiety sensitivity react with intense worry when they see early signs of a heart attack or stroke.
Their barely noticeable physical sensations or minor anxiety can lead to panic attacks.

Many anxiety-related disorders, including panic disorder, are genetically influenced.

The levels of neuroticism can be influenced by genes, which can set the stage for excessive worry.
People who experience GAD are almost indistinguishable from those who experience major depression, which is associated with elevated neuroticism.
There is a shared genetic pathway for these disorders.

Like a car that's stuck in gear, people with OCD experience problems with shifting thoughts and behaviors.

Brain scans show an abnormality in white matter and increased activity in parts of the brain where information is prioritized and organized.
People can't seem to get their thoughts out of their minds.

Pick out the characteristics of mood disorders.

Imagine if we were interviewing someone who came to us for help.

As the client begins to talk about his life, it becomes clear that even the simplest activities, like dressing and driving to work, have become enormous acts of will.
He won't answer the phone.

He is lying for hours looking at the television.

His mood is downcast and sometimes he tears up in his eyes.
He lost a lot of weight.
His world is empty.

He told us at the end of the interview that he was contemplating suicide.

The difficulties meet his symptoms.

Children can become depressed.

These disorders show the extremes of mood disorders, from major depression on one end to bipolar disorder on the other.

More than 20% of us will experience a mood disorder over the course of a lifetime.

More than 16 percent of Americans are affected by major depression.

Depression has been dubbed the "common cold" of psychological disorders.
We will soon see that this description doesn't capture the depths of suffering that people with this condition experience.

People in their 30s are more likely to suffer from depression.

They're less common in older people than in younger people.
Women are more likely to experience depression than men are.

The gender difference may be related to women's tendency to ruminate more than men.

Depression art is an artistic genre that depicts the personal anguish and emotional pain that can accompany severe depression.

Some children commit suicide due to clinical depression.

Sex differences in depression are not universal.

Depression in men is underdiagnosed in Western cultures.

Women are more likely to seek psychological services if they are socialized to act tough.

Like the common cold, depression is recurrent.

The earlier depression is more likely to persist or recur if it strikes the first time.

Depression can cause severe impairment, which is very different to the common cold.
In extreme cases, people may fail to feed or clothe themselves or take care of basic health needs like brushing their teeth or showering.

Depression can cause Explanations for Major Depressive Disorder by triggering rejection from others and contributing to more depression.

Multiple factors can combine to cause depression.

We imagined interviewing a depressed man at the beginning of the section.
He may have had a tendency to respond to stress with negative emotions because of his depressed father and anxious mother.
He spent hours ruminating about losing his job and becoming convinced that a colleague was trying to undermine his authority.
He began to refuse invitations to go golfing with his friends.
His friends tried to cheer him up, but the black cloud over his head wouldn't budge.
His friends stopped inviting him to do anything when he felt rejected.
He moped around doing nothing as his once bright social world became a black void.
He felt powerless.
His thoughts turned to suicide.

This example shows a point.

To fully understand depression, we need to understand the complex interplay of all of the following: inborn tendencies, stress, loss of reinforcers, feelings of helplessness, and negative thoughts.

Sigmund Freud believed that early loss can lead to depression later in life.

Depression is tied to stress life events that represent loss or threat of separation, so he may have been on to something.
It's important to know whether we'll become depressed if we lose something we value, like someone we love, financial support, or self-esteem.

Pessimism and other symptoms of depression can lead to negative life consequences, like being fired from a job or losing a close relationship.

The depression that James Coyne hypothesized creates problems.

He argued that when people become depressed, they seek excessive reassurance, which in turn leads others to dislike and reject them.

Students will be interacting with patients with depression.

Those who had not interacted with patients without depression were more depressed, anxious, and hostile than those who had.

Participants were less interested in interacting with patients with depression in the future.
Depression is a vicious cycle for Coyne.

Replicability depression can cause negative feelings in others and seek excessive reassurance.

People with depression give up when they don't get a payoff.

They can't get reinforcement from others because they stop participating in many pleasant activities.
Their personal and social worlds shrink as depression creeps into virtually every area of their lives.
Some people with depression lack social skills, which makes it harder for them to get reinforcement from people they value.
They may reinforce and maintain their withdrawal if others respond with sympathy and concern.
Pushing ourselves to engage in pleasant activities is the recipe for breaking the grip of depression.
Getting out of bed can be the first step in conquering depression.

The negative experiences of people with depression are reinforced by these schemas.

A depressed person's view of the world is bleak because they put a negative spin on their experiences and are biased to recall negative events.

Selec mistakenly believes that people come to a negative conclusion based on only an isolated fact that they are more likely to win a gamble aspect of a situation.
If they toss the dice, a man might single out a small mistake he made in the game, and blame himself for the loss.
It's like people with depres do.
People who have mild depression are less likely to fall prey to life's negative experiences into sharper focus because they wear glasses that filter out all of life's positive experiences.
Depressed feelings and inaccurate perceptions may lead to this thinking error compared with nondeto depression.

Beck's idea that people with depression hold more realistic views of themselves, the future, and the world is supported by a lot of people.

The evidence for the role of cognitive distortions in nonhospitalized, or not seriously depressed individuals isn't as strong.

Dogs usually jump over the barrier to the nonelectrified side of the box to avoid painful shocks.

Seligman was surprised by something.

Dogs are restrained in a hammock and exposed.

Even when they could easily get away from them, Martin Seligman box was used.

Some of the dogs just sat there and found that some of the dogs were first prevented from crying and then passively accepting the shocks as though they were inescapable.

They had learned to be powerless.

There are parallels between the effects of learned helplessness and the effects of depression.

The warning of Light must be cautious in drawing conclusions from animal studies because many psycho impending shock logical conditions, including depression, may differ in animals and humans.

Seligman's model can't account for everything.

It doesn't explain why people with depression make internal attributions.

The model doesn't acknowledge that the mere expectation of uncontrollability isn't enough to induce depression.

People don't become sad when they receive large amounts of money in Dog because they don't have control over that event.

Good scientists revise data when it doesn't fit a model.

There are important alternatives people make to explain their worlds.

A person with depression might blame a poor test grade on a lack of ability, an internal factor, and a good score on the ease of the exam, an external factor.

Internal, global, and stable attributions may be more to blame than a cause of depression.

The difference between how we feel and how we want to feel is what determines whether or not we develop depression.

People's ideal emo tendency to feel helpless is influenced by cultural factors.

We can't control events in Hong Kong Chinese.

Americans and Asian Americans value excitement more than Europeans and Hong Kong Chinese.

The size of the gap between ideal and actual emotion is correlated with depression in all three cultural groups.

The rate of reuptake of serotonin can be affected by specific variations in the serotonin transporter gene.

People who inherit two copies of the stress-sensitive genes are more likely to develop depression than people who don't have the genes.
The stress-sensitive genes affect people's ability to deal with stress.

Can the results be duplicated?

The hope is that these studies will clarify whether any genetic anomalies that surface are related to depression or anxiety.

Many patients with depression have problems in the brain's reward and stress-response systems.

Depression is often associated with an inability to experience pleasure.

Some cases of depression and other mental disorders may be caused by inflammation, whether brought about by an infection or a hype-up immune response due to other causes.

The discovery of previously unknown vessels linking the immune system to the brain may provide a means for understanding how a malfunctioning immune system could impact the brain and cause or worsen mental disorders.

Loss of reinforcement and learned helplessness are possible explanations for the causes of depression.

Pick one of the explanations and propose a study to evaluate it.

Manic episodes can be marked by dramatically elevated mood, decreased need for sleep, increased energy and activity, inflated self elevated mood, decreased need for esteem, and irresponsible behavior.

People in a manic episode often sleep, have inflated energy, and are difficult to interrupt, as though they can't get their words out quickly enough.

A manic episode begins with a rapid increase in symptoms.

After their early 20s, people usually experience their first manic episode.

Bipo condition, marked by a history of at lar disorder, is equally common in men and women.

Up to at least one manic episode is the majority of cases.

90 percent of people have had at least one manic episode.

Some episodes are separated by many years and then have a series of episodes.
A manic episode precedes or follows a major depression episode.
Substance abuse and sexual behavior can be caused by manic episodes.
People go on spending sprees during manic episodes.
Ed Bazinet, one of New York's wealthiest people, who made millions selling miniature ceramic houses, experienced a manic episode at the New York International Gift Fair.
After ordering more than $20 million worth of body and home goods, Bazinet checked into a mental health facility.
Judgement is often severely impaired during manic episodes.
One of your book's authors treated a manic patient who passed himself off to a financial company as his own father, gained access to his father's savings for retirement, and gambled away his entire family fortune.
He spent most of his life's savings by buying more than 100 bowling balls.

The negative effects of a manic episode can last for many years.

One of the most genetically influenced mental disorders is bicyke disorder.

According to two studies, its heritability ranges from 60 percent to 85 percent.
There's at least some genetic overlap between psychotic symptoms in bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, and many genes appear to be culprits in increasing the risk.

Increased activity in structures related to emotion, such as the amygdala, and decreased activity in areas associated with planning, such as the prefrontal cortex, are found in people with bipolar disorder.

Correlation and Causation aren't clear about the cause-effect relationship between mood disorders and physiological findings.

There are more than biological factors that affect the condition.

Stressful life events are associated with an increased risk of manic episodes and a longer recovery from manic episodes.
The intersection of genetic and sociocultural forces can cause psychological disorders.

Major depression and bipolar disorder are associated with a higher risk of suicide than most other disorders.

The suicide rate of people with bipolar disorder is 15 times higher than that of the general population, and more than a third of them have attempted suicide.
Increased suicide risk is associated with anxiety disorders, such as panic disorder and social anxiety disorder, as well as substance abuse.
Scientists ranked suicide as the 10th-leading cause of death in the United States and the eighth-leading cause of death among Native Americans.

More than 40,000 people commit suicide in the United States each year, a number that surely underestimates the problem because relatives report many suicides as accidents.

There are an estimated 8 to 25 attempts for each completed suicide.

Talking to people with depression makes them more likely to commit suicide.

Most people who commit suicide do not communicate warning.

The risk of suicide may decrease as a result of a severe depression.

Some suicidal behaviors are motivated by attention.

Talking about suicide is more likely to be committed.

Three people take their own lives for every two people who are victims of homicide.

The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco has been the site of more than 1,200 suicides and has been the subject of many myths.

It's important to try to predict suicide attempts because most of them happen in a short period of time.

Longitudinal studies can't be conducted to determine which people will attempt suicide.

It would be unethical to allow people believed to be at high suicide risk to go through with attempts.

Predicting suicide is difficult because of the low prevalence.

The rate of completed suicide is between 12 and 13 out of 100,000 people.
Our best guess is that no one will grow to commit suicide if only one-hundredth of 1 percent of the population completes a suicide.

Risk factors for suicide have been taught in research.

30-40 percent of people who kill themselves have made at least one previous attempt, which is the best predictor of suicide.

Almost three times as many women try to kill themselves as men do.

It is a strong predictor of suicide risk.