What are the effects of depression on self-esteem?

This is what is known about the impact that clinical depression has on self-esteem.

Depression is one of the most prevalent mental disorders, so it is a problem to be taken into account.

There are many effects it can have on the person suffering from this ailment, but on this occasion we are going to focus on the patient's self-esteem. In the following lines we will try to analyze the main ways in which the depression can have repercussions on the self-esteem..

The relationship between depression and self-esteem

Before plunging fully into the problem of the impact of depression on self-esteem, it is convenient to make a brief introduction in which we clarify these concepts. It would be inappropriate to go into this issue before clarifying such important terms as the very idea of depression and also self-esteem.

Depression is a psychopathology framed within the disorders of mood and characterized by a deep and recurrent feeling of sadness and/or hopelessness.. This feeling may be accompanied by many others, all of a negative nature, such as frustration, easy irritability, general malaise, or a feeling of helplessness, among others.

Although later we will see in depth the impact of depression on self-esteem, we should know that this diagnosis is usually characterized by a great sense of hopelessness under three different perspectives. One of them is the sufferer's own life, another is about the world in general, and the third refers to future events, which are anticipated from a pessimistic point of view.

On the other hand, focusing now on self-esteem, we can define this concept as an evaluation of the person himself in which he makes a judgment about what he is worth. In this sense, the person may make positive or negative judgments in a punctual or recurrent manner. If the subject tends to make negative self-evaluations, we consider that he/she has a low self-esteem.. If his or her self-perception is usually positive, we would be talking about high self-esteem.

Having simply reviewed the definitions of these two concepts, we can anticipate that the impact of depression on self-esteem will be profound and negative, i.e., depression will cause the self-esteem of the person who suffers from it to be increasingly lower. Now it is necessary that we stop to review the processes through which this phenomenon occurs.

The impact of depression on how we see and value ourselves.

We have anticipated that the impact of depression on self-esteem is notorious and unfavorable. What we need to analyze is through which pathways this issue happens and what the consequences are for each of them. We will now carry out this task.

1. Beck's cognitive triad

As mentioned in the introduction, depression triggers negative ideas at three levels: about the subject himself, about the world and about the future. This is what is known as Beck's cognitive triad, named after Aaron T. Beck, an American psychiatrist who developed this theory in 1976, and it is still valid today.

Within this triad, for the issue at hand, the element of negative self-perceptions is of particular interest, which is a reflection of the impact of depression on self-esteem. Of the three cognitive dysfunctions Beck outlines in his model, this is the one that explains why self-esteem experiences a decline.

The subject who is suffering from major depression finds himself in a spiral of negative thoughts that a spiral of negative thoughts that make him/her reach such negative self-judgments as that he/she is a useless person, that he/she is incapable of achieving his/her goals, that he/she is incapable of achieving his/her goals, and that he/she is incapable of achieving his/her goals. and therefore of achieving happiness, that he/she only has defects, that he/she is sick, that he/she is at a disadvantage with the rest of people, etc.

Of course, the other components of Beck's triad do nothing but add to the impact of depression on self-esteem, because to this list of negative self-evaluations that the person would be making, is added the perception that there is no hope of improvement, because everything in the world is wrong, both in the present and in the future, so the only thing that awaits him is defeat.

2. The affection of memories

There are other ways in which depression can deteriorate the patient's self-esteem as it worsens. One of them has to do, not with the future, as we saw in Beck's triad, but with the past. How is this possible? By means of the emotional responses that the subject experiences to memories.

This mechanism is the one proposed by psychologists Dahyeon Kim and K. Lira Yoon, from the University of Notre Dame, in the United States. According to these authors, another way of exploring the impact of depression on self-esteem is by means of the bias that occurs in people with depression when analyzing negative and positive information about themselves..

To this end, they carried out an investigation in which they formed an experimental group, with depressive patients, and a control group, which did not suffer from this pathology. Both groups were given a series of tasks in which they had to remember positive and negative past events.

What they found was that the members of the control group experienced with greater intensity the memories whose emotional content was of a positive nature, compared to those of a negative nature.compared to those that were negative. That is, those memories that evoked happy moments of their lives provoked a more powerful reaction than those that, on the contrary, made them relive sad moments.

However, something different happened in the experimental group. In this case, the researchers found no significant difference between the level of intensity they experienced when thinking about happy memories and sad memories. But these psychologists wanted to go further and did a new experiment, which allows us to see even better the impact of depression on self-esteem.

In this case, they drew up two groups, experimental and control, with the same criteria as in the previous case. All the components were asked to try to list three memories from their biography that they considered happy and three that they considered sad. Afterwards, they had to answer two simple questions for each of them: how happy or sad they were in the past, when they lived those events, and how they are in the present when recalling that moment.

After analyzing the results, they came to different conclusions. The first was that there were no differences between individuals with major depression and those without it in terms of the intensity of the emotion they felt in the past, regardless of whether the memory was of a negative or positive nature. This data served to prove that both groups were using memories of a comparable level, as expected.

On the other hand, when comparing the intensity with which both groups experienced the memories in the present moment, significant differences were found.. Specifically, when talking about memories of happy moments and how they made them feel in the present, the group of people with depression reported a significantly lower level of intensity than the control group.

In other words, they found that the evocation of a happy past moment led to an increase in well-being for the healthy people, which could promote their self-esteem. However, in patients with major depression, such recollections did not lead to any improvement in their mood in the present, consolidating the impact of the memories on their self-esteem.This consolidated the impact of depression on self-esteem.

3. When self-esteem is the facilitator of depression

Although we are reviewing the different ways in which depression could be affecting the patient's self-esteem, we cannot forget that these elements interact and feed back on each other to such an extent that the mechanism can also be understood in the other direction.

In this sense, one would expect that a person with a low basic self-esteem would be more likely to develop depression, given the right circumstances, than a person with a higher self-esteem. depression under the right circumstances, compared to a person whose self-esteem is higher. Therefore, when studying the impact of depression on self-esteem, it is important to bear in mind that this pathology has a multifactorial origin.

This implies that, precisely, self-esteem can play an important role in the genesis of depression, regardless of the fact that, once developed, the disease can make the self-concept of the person suffering from it even more negative.