When do negative thoughts turn into depression?

When do negative thoughts turn into depression?

By Margaret Rogers

We all have times when life seems to get us down and we start to have a negative outlook.  Being able to turn negative thoughts into positive ones at an early enough stage could prevent to onset of depression, according to recent research.

Researchers wanted to see if they could pinpoint when negative thinking tips over into the onset of depression.  To do this they used the Zauszniewski Depression Cognition Scale (DCS) which was developed by Jaclene Zauszniewski.  The DCS is a brief survey to help healthcare providers to identify depressive thinking patterns which, if left unidentified, could lead to serious depression.

This scale requires individuals to answer questions on helplessness, purposelessness, hopelessness, powerlessness, worthlessness, loneliness, meaninglessness and emptiness.  The answers are given a scale that ranges from ‘strongly disagree’ to ‘strongly agree’

Zauszniewski said ‘Clinicians need guidelines and measures to know when negative thinking has reached a tipping point and has begun to spiral into clinical depression.’  The DCS is used in America and around the world to screen for the symptoms of serious depression.

The research was conducted by the Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing at Case Western Reserve University.  The study compared data from 629 healthy adults who responded to an internet survey.  The participants were aged between 21 -84 years of age and most of them had a college education and an income of over $40,000 a year.  As depression is more common in women 70% of the participants were female.

In this study scores on the DCS were compared to the Centre of Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D) which is considered to be one of the best measures for identifying the symptoms of significant depression. 

It was discovered that a score of 7 on the DCS is the pivotal point when individuals should start find ways to change negative thoughts into positive ones.  Furthermore, the findings also demonstrate that at this score, the DCS accurately demonstrate whether a person has or has not got clinical depressive symptoms as determined by the CES-D.

The findings are published in the Western Journal of Nursing Research and are entitled ‘Screening Measure for Early Detection of Depressive Symptoms: The Depressive Cognition Scale.’