14 DAY TRIAL // A new scientific study comes to show a completely new angle of the way health experts look at depression. The paper says that it's not necessarily negative thoughts and emotions that make up the main characteristics of the condition, but rather sufferers' inabilities to see the bright side of things. Difficulties in learning what the good things in life are can lead to most of the symptoms associated with the condition.
The researchers behind the new paper uphold that people are used to interpreting the things or actions that depressive patients do as if they come from a person that is bleak all the time. According to the new paper, it may be that the former are in fact unable to find anything around them to bring them joy, this being the main reason why they are depressed.
Their situation is not at all different from that of “normal” individuals, who also get sad when things don't go their way. The only difference is that the latter category gets past the troubles at one point, and becomes optimistic again, whereas depressed individuals do not, and remain in their state of mind for longer periods of time.
“Since depression is characterized by negative thinking, it is easy to assume that depressed people learn the negative lessons of life better than non-depressed people – but that's not true,” the co-author of the new study, Laren Conklin, who is also a graduate student in psychology at the Ohio State University, explains. Her paper appears in the March issue of the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry.
“Depressed people may have a tendency to remember the negative experiences in a situation, but not remember the good things that happened. Therapists need to be aware of that,” she stresses. “Before, if researchers wanted to investigate how people formed new attitudes, it was very difficult to do. Therapists might focus more on helping their depressed clients recognize and remember the positive aspects of their new experiences,” OSU assistant professor of psychology Daniel Strunk, who is also a co-author of the paper, adds.