What are the effects of depression on self-esteem?

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

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

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The relationship between depression and self-esteem

Before immersing ourselves fully in the problem of the impact of depression on self-esteem, it is convenient to make a brief introduction in which we clarify these concepts. And it is that it would be inappropriate to go into this question before making clear terms as important as the idea of ​​depression itself and also self-esteem.

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

Although later we will see in depth the impact of depression on self-esteem, we must know that this diagnosis is usually characterized by a great sense of hopelessness under three perspectives different. One of them is the life of the subject who suffers it, another is about the world in general and the third of them refers to future events, which are anticipated from a perspective pessimistic.

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 specific or recurring manner. If the subject tends to make negative self-evaluations, we consider that he has low self-esteem. If your perception of yourself is usually positive, we would be talking about high self-esteem.

Simply having reviewed the definitions of these two concepts, we can anticipate that the impact of depression on self-esteem will vary. to be deep and negative in nature, that is, depression will generate that the self-esteem of the person who suffers from it is more and more short. Now it is necessary that we stop to review the processes through which this phenomenon occurs.

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The impact of depression on how we see and value ourselves

We have anticipated that the impact of depression on self-esteem is dramatic and unfavorable. What we must analyze is by what means this issue occurs and what are the consequences of each of them. Next we will carry out this task.

1. Beck's cognitive triad

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

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

The subject who is suffering from major depression is in a spiral of negative thoughts that make him come to judgments of himself as negative as that he is a useless person, that he is unable to achieve his goals and therefore to achieve happiness, who only has defects, who is sick, who is at a disadvantage with other people, etc.

Of course, the other components of Beck's triad only add to this the impact of depression on self-esteem, because to that list of negative self-evaluations that the person would be doing, adds 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 you is the defeat.

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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 it possible? Through 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 to explore the impact of depression on self-esteem is through the bias that occurs in people with depression when analyzing negative and positive information about themselves.

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

What they found is that the members of the control group experienced with greater intensity the memories whose emotional content was positive., versus those that were negative. That is to say, those memories that evoked happy moments in their life, 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 created two groups, experimental and control, with the same criteria as in the previous case. All the members were asked to try to list three memories from their biography that they considered happy and three others that they considered sad. Then they had to answer two simple questions for each of them: how happy or sad were they in the past, when they lived those events, and how they are in the present when recalling that moment.

After analyzing the results, they reached different conclusions. The first is that there were no differences between individuals with major depression and those who did not have it in terms of intensity of the emotion they felt in the past moment, regardless of whether the memory was negative or positive. This data helped them to verify that both groups were using memories of a comparable level, as expected.

Conversely, When comparing the intensity with which both groups lived the memories in the present moment, important differences were found. Specifically, when talking about the memories of happy times and how they made them feel in the present, the group of people with depression reported a level of intensity significantly lower than that of the group control.

In other words, they found that recalling a happy past moment increased well-being for healthy people, which could boost their self-esteem. However, in patients with major depression, these memories did not imply any improvement in their current mood, which consolidated the impact of depression on self-esteem.

3. When self-esteem is what facilitates depression

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

In that sense, A person with low self-esteem would be expected to be more likely to develop depression if the right circumstances exist, in front of a person whose self-esteem is higher. Therefore, when studying the impact of depression on self-esteem, it is important that we bear in mind that this pathology has a multifactorial origin.

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