Journal of Psychology & Psychotherapy
Open Access

Abstract

Depression, Antidepressants and Cognitions: Silent Schemas in the Walking Wounded

Cindy L Carter

Cognitive and pharmaceutical interventions and outcomes for depression are compared, with attention to their long-term effects on a range of negative schema. A subset of residual dysfunctional schema is identified and shown to influence patients during periods of mood or stress induction while under pharmaceutical treatment as well as following cessation of pharmaceutical interventions. The same dysfunctional schema, however, show a more effective and enduring pattern of positive modification in response to cognitive treatment. Medication is acknowledged to provide symptomatic relief from a subset of negative schema, without modifying a full complement of deeply rooted, tenacious negative beliefs. Patients medicated for depression, even in the absence of overt depressive symptoms, carry emotionally masked and dormant maladaptive schemas which may continue, through their carriers’ thoughts and behaviors, to influence their own behavior and affect others in their environment who may or may not be medicated.