Theories of Depression

Albert Bandura:

Albert Bandura came up with the theory called "Social Cognitive Theory". It focused on the learning that occurs within a social context. It also takes into consideration the fact that people learn from one another, including observational learning, imitation, and modeling. He stated that people can learn by observing the behavior is of others and the outcomes of those behaviors,l learning can occur without a change in behavior, also cognition plays a role in this theory, since social learning theory has become increasingly cognitive in its interpretation of human learning. He also believed that the environment reinforces and punishes modeling The Social learning theory can be considered a bridge or a transition between behaviorist learning theories and cognitive learning theories.


Julian Rotter:

Julian Rotter came up with the theory called "Social Learning Theory". This Theory is derived from the work of Albert Bandura.It stated that the environment is defined as the external stimuli that the individual recognizes and responds to. The theory was based upon five main concepts. The first of these concepts is reinforcement, describes anything that has an influencing effect on occurrence, a type of behavior, or direction. The next concept is reinforcement value, which is the amount of preference that one has for any reinforcement to exist if the various reinforcements were equal.The next concept is psychological situation which is characterized in regards to a person, this allows an individual to categorize based on other specific situations, and also allows a person to differentiate it from others as well.The next concept is expectancy, refers to the probability that an individual has that a specific reinforcement will exist as a certain function of a particular behavior on the individual's part within a certain or various situations. The last of Julian Rotter's major concepts is generalized expectancy, its expectancy that counts for numerous and various situations that are comparable to each other to a certain degree.


Martin Seligman:

Martin Seligman came up with the theory of "Learned Helplessness". Learned Helplessness is seen as a coping mechanism some people employ in order to survive difficult or abusive circumstances. This has also been associated with several different psychological disorders. Depression, anxiety, phobias, shyness and loneliness can all be exacerbated by learned helplessness. Martin came up with this theory by conducting a very cruel experiment on dogs, which included ringing a bell while shocking a restrained dog. He then allowed it to move out of the way and rang the bell again. The dog did not move since it had learned was not that ringing a bell means pain, but that it is useless trying to get away from shocks. He believed that how we attribute the events that occur in our lives has a significant effect on our attitudes and efforts in improving our lot.


Aaron Beck:

Aaron Beck came up with the theory of "Cognitive Behavior". He believed that that one's thoughts and beliefs affect one’s behavior and subsequent actions, that dysfunctional behavior is caused due to dysfunctional thinking, and that thinking is shaped by our beliefs. Our beliefs decide the course of our action. Theorists suggest that depression results from faulty and irrational psychological perception, which cause distorted learning and reasoning. Depression could be a result of a traumatic experience or incapability of adaptive coping skills. Depressive people have a negative perception or belief about themselves and their environment. The more someone has negative thoughts more is the severity of one's depression symptoms.

The Lobotomist

In the video “The Lobotomist” we were explained about the origins of the lobotomy, how was procedure was performed and the consequences this lead to. The neurologist Walter J. Freeman has been coined the name “ The Lobotomist” after performing 3,439 lobotomies in his lifetime. This procedure would begin with the patient being electroshocked in order to subdue the patient, then lifted the patient's eyelid and inserted an ice pick-like instrument called a leucotome through a tear duct. A few taps with a surgical hammer breached the bone, pushed the leucotome about an inch and a half into the frontal lobe of the patient's brain, and moved the sharp tip back and forth. Then he repeated the process with the other eye socket. Through this process they achieved that the tool cut vertically down the side of the cortex of the interhemispherical fissure All cuts were designed to transect the white fibrous matter connecting the cortical tissue of the prefrontal cortex to the thalamus. The leucotome was then withdrawn. Walter J Freeman believed that problems in the brain led to mental disorders. After arriving at St. Elizabeth’s mental hospital in Washington on 1924, as the new director he was shocked at the places decline, how people were just thrown together, abused and not taken care. Walter set out to fix this. He realized shock therapy did not get rid of the problem, it just made it less severe. So he decided to be the first doctor in the United States to try Portuguese physician and neurologist António Egas Moniz’s procedure which involved drilling holes in the patient's head and destroying tissue in the frontal lobes by cutting brain tissue by rotating a retractable wire loop. Moniz was given the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1949 for this work. At the beginning Walter along with his colleague and friend James W. Watts performed the first prefrontal leucotomy in the United States in 1936. But they still had a problem with this procedure, it required drilling holes in the scalp, so surgery had to be performed in an operating room by trained neurosurgeons. Walter believed this surgery would be unavailable to those he saw as needing it most such as the patients in state mental hospitals that had no operating rooms, surgeons, or anesthesia and limited budgets. Walter Freeman began to travel around the nation in his own personal van, demonstrating transorbital lobotomy in any hospital that would have him. He even performed a few in hotel rooms, lobotomizing children as young as thirteen for “delinquent behavior” and housewives who had lost their enthusiasm for domestic work. simplify the procedure so that it could be carried out by psychiatrists in mental asylums. His first live patient was a woman name that went through the trans orbital lobotomy was a woman names Helen, she survived the procedure. After the success Walter promoted the procedure to more than 55 hospitals in 23 states. He would set up graphic exhibits and used hand-held clackers to draw audiences. Lobotomies were used on 40,000 to 50,000 Americans between 1936 and the late 1950s. Walter’s criteria was that their symptoms would go away, if they came back he would operate again. Many patients often had to be retaught how to eat and use the bathroom. Relapses were common, and three percent died from the procedure. Many critics were outraged but it was considered in bad taste during this time period to write publicly against it, therefore it would not stop it. Walter lost his medical license at the end of his career when he killed a patient. When a new pharmaceutical options became available it really marked the end of the lobotomy. I believe that Walter Freeman believed that he was doing the right thing , and that he was actually patients deal and freeing them from their mental illness. All though this procedure was not very ethical it was the only thing available to help patients with mental illnesses therefore it was a necessary procedure.



Sources:
http://www.psychosurgery.org/about-lobotomy/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobotomy
http://www.mcmanweb.com/lobotomy.html

Bipolar Disorder

Before watching "Boy Interrupted" when i though about bipolar disorder i only though about it being about crazy people who have mood swings that change every minute, i never really understood how serious it was. The documentary was very shocking and sad and i though it was very informative. I felt so bad for Evan's parents because i now see that this is a very distructive condition that also has very fatal consequences for a lot of people. I was also really impressed by Evan's parents in the sense that it must have taken a lot of their part to gather their strength and talk about their son and his suicide in order to prevent and maybe inform people about how serious bipolar disorder is. I can not even imagine how horrible it must be to have such a condition in which you struggle for your life every single day and having a condition that has no cure. I think that the most shocking part of the video was learning that even was obsessed about death and planning his own death when he was just a little boy and i can't imagine how horrible it must have felt for his mother that nobody really believed her what was happening. I really enjoyed the documentary and i feel it opened my eyes to this disorder that i did not really know a lot about.