Working With Depression Case Studies

Working with case scenario 1, it is quite evident that Simone is suffering depression and anxiety. When working with depression, there are two basic interventions; one is increasing a valued activity, the other is changing the thoughts that keep the depression going (Otto, 2011). From previous sessions with Simone and exploring what has recently been causing negative thinking, her automated thoughts have been revealed. We can assume her recurring thoughts of feeling like a failure and her thought of having nothing to offer in life are perpetuating her low mood, loss of interest in activities, and procrastination in looking for a new job. “Negative automated thoughts, when unchallenged, often become self fulfilling prophecies during the

This technique helps the client teeth out the validity of their automatic thoughts by actually working with their thoughts and evaluating the evidence (Wright, 2017). The goal is not to completely change the thought from 100% failure to 100% success (O’Donohue, 2012). Feeling like a failure is a rather strong thought, and when working with Simone we asked her to think like a detective and provide evidence that she is a failure and evidence she isn’t a failure. Two columns were drawn, and we brainstormed with her to provide evidence for each side (APPIVideo, 2017). A potential downfall to this exercise is that it is easy for clients to come up more evidence for the thought than against it, and it is important to help the client identify evidence against their thought (Tolin, 2016). To Simone’s surprise, she was able to provide an adequate amount of information that she isn’t a failure. She told us she had potential job offers and some men from Facebook have contacted her finding out she was single again and asked her on a

This was an important step as it made Simone think back and describe a time in her life things were going well. We then reexamined the evidence against her thought of feeling like a failure, which was a great opportunity to correlate a time of her past when not depressed with the current evidence she gave us that she isn’t a failure. This gave Simone the chance to look at her situation in an alternate way, which she hasn’t before. “Higher functioning clients will usually take to cognitive restructuring, they are able to identify what they are thinking and feeling and can discuss their thoughts analytically” (Tolin, p 330,