Self-reinforcement

A lot of the thoughts, feelings and behaviour, which occur in connection with depression, can itself contribute to prolonging and strengthening the course of depression, hence having a self-increasing effect.

Feelings and memory

If you feel down, it can affect your memory in a way only to make you think negative rather than positive. You might, for example, have the feeling that life until now has been dreadful even though it hasn't actually been the case. This distortion of your memory strengthens and prolongs your depression.

In studies, where healthy trial subjects were made to feel depressed through hypnosis and chemical substances, it has been proven that the feelings distort the memory. The trial subjects, who were made depressed "artificially", they remembered their past in a more negative way than they did a few hours earlier when they were in their normal mood.

Behavioural change

If you are depressed, a behavioural change occurs, which can mean that your relationships with others deteriorates. Your behaviour is changed by you becoming more passive and more "negative" in your behaviour towards others. For example, members of your family or colleagues.

Your negative behaviour towards others also causes them to react negatively towards you. This is of course a problem, as they distance themselves from you instead of comforting and encouraging you. Therefore, you become even more convinced about your life's misery and that can cause you to slide deeper into depression.

Vicious circles

These two circumstances create a self-reinforcing "vicious circle" of negative thoughts and feelings and negative relationships with others. This eventually creates two vicious circles, one inner and one outer circle.

The inner vicious circle is the negative thoughts about life, which constantly prevails as a thought pattern in you and which makes you vulnerable. During periods of adversity, the inner vicious circle causes you to feel severely down. This dejection increases your negative thoughts, your negative thoughts increase the dejection and so it continues.

The outer vicious circle increases your tendency to react passively or negatively towards others. You, thereby push the people closest to you away, which means you become more lonely. And when you become more lonely, you become more depressed etc.

Cognitive therapy

The vicious circles can continue long after the outer triggering that causes the depression have ceased (such as a divorce or losing your job). This means that you and the people around you have forgotten what it was that started the depression!

But you can do something in that situation. cognitive behavioural therapy is a form of psychotherapy which actually analyzes and changed inappropriate forms of thoughts and behaviours. This is an effective but time consuming form of therapy.