Conclusions
Although we certainly agree with Beck's original ideas that depression results from people's negative interpretations of events, unlike Beck we believe that many of the interpretations are not necessarily distortions. Awful and difficult events happen to many people, and many depressions are preceded by truly negative life stressors. We propose that stressors result both from fate and from human agency. And maybe we will get as much mileage from studies of individual differences in stress generation and stress resolution as from a previous round of studies of individual differences in cognitions about stress. How do people create and manage their environments? Just as the study of depression has profited enormously from exploring its antecedent social context, we propose that even stressful events need to be studied in context—especially the interpersonal and family context. These processes shift over time and have mutual influences on each other. This leads to some very complex multigenerational, historical, transactional, and cognitive models, and that is what I meant when I titled this work “the plot thickens.”
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Hammen, C. Life events and depression: The plot thickens. Am J Commun Psychol 20, 179–193 (1992). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00940835
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00940835