subject: Depression - cause of ill health [print this page] Depression - cause of ill health Depression - cause of ill health
Many people have suffered from depression. Brilliance often goes hand in hand with mental illness. Depression usually brings on an explosive chain reaction of negative thoughts. When people are depressed, negative thoughts occur practically every minute of the day, each time generating more misery and pessimism.
Unfortunately once this process begins, the depressed person has a tendency to add fuel to the fire and keeps it ablaze. The repeated, often almost continuous, negative thoughts keep depression alive and pervert the course of emotional healing. Negative predictions like I'm never going to get over this problem or suffering is a tendency to make highly negative pessimistic predictions about the future which can lead to despair and hopelessness for months.
The destructive thoughts among many are: jumping into conclusions with an inclination to conclude the worst in the absence of substantial evidence, assuming or admitting that when something is wrong then somehow it is always your fault and insistiting that things should be in a certain way, this can be directed towards yourself, toward others and towards the realities of life. These types of thinking always have the effects of intensitying painful emotions, they never reduce misery or change situations.
Each of these cognitive distortions shares two things in common with the others, they distort in some way one's view of reality resulting in a loss of perspective and extremely negative and pessimistic views of oneself, current and future situations; each cognitive distortion has the effect of intensifying emotional pain. If unrecognised and unchallenged, such distortions in thinking will almost certainly result in an ongoing destructive depressive process. The reality of all is that it is quite a complex and powerful process which can wreak havoc in one's life. The simple systematic technique that can be used to reduce and in some cases even halt the process all together is to interrupt the process as it occurs.
