From the author: published on the website Depression (cognitive approach). According to Aaron Beck, psychological disorders, that is, painful feelings, strange behavior and various unpleasant psychological symptoms, arise from an inadequate way of perceiving and processing information about what is happening to a person and his environment. Cognitions are verbal judgments or images of perception, they are associated with underlying attitudes, beliefs and ideas. The conclusions that are drawn in the future can be considered as hypotheses to be tested. Therefore, within the framework of cognitive psychology, it is believed that the ways of understanding situations and events significantly influence feeling states and behavior. Knowledge about events (mental) depends on past experience, which is used to evaluate and classify these events. Self-explanation of stressful situations is the process of a person’s adaptation to a rapidly changing world. This process includes: assessment of events, mobilization of abilities and opportunities, issues of risk and choice, as well as ways to deal with stress. Under high stress loads, when there is a threat to life's needs, this normal adaptive process changes. As a result, a person moves to extremely one-sided, overgeneralized conclusions and decisions on a global scale. These misinterpretations of events lead to unpleasant emotions, which are greatly exaggerated emotions (for example, sadness is caused by explaining events in terms of deprivation or defeat). With depression, ordinary sadness will turn into a huge feeling of total loss or complete fiasco. The normal desire of any person for peace of mind leads to an absolute avoidance of any emotions, up to a state of emotional emptiness. As a result, at the level of behavior there is often a refusal to move towards any goal, and even from any activity. A person's sensitivity to stress depends on biological predisposition and individual experience. Some people are more sensitive to obstacles to freedom of choice and independence, others, on the contrary, to the breakdown of interpersonal relationships. Depression can be characterized by the so-called “cognitive triad”. It consists of three groups of negative assessments - yourself, the world around you and your future. A person considers himself inferior, defenseless, deprived of everything, having only shortcomings. He blames the world around him for exorbitant demands, insurmountable obstacles to achieving goals, lack of joy in life and problems in communicating with other people. The future, according to a person suffering from depression, only brings a worsening of all deprivations and defeats; there will be nothing good there. From these thoughts flow all the sensory and behavioral aspects of depression. If you yourself are not able to do anything, you need to depend more on others, then pessimism, paralysis of the will, refusal to be active. If we do not expect anything good from the future, then we feel a loss of energy, apathy, and inertia. One of the main problems with depression is the tendency to pay attention only to the negative side of any event or phenomenon. Most likely, it develops in early childhood from communication with significant adults. The cognitive model of depression can be represented as a distortion of the basic properties of thinking, such as cognitive elements, cognitive processes. Cognitive elements are understood as two levels: a) automatic thoughts, images that speak about the process of information processing; b) basic schemes, they are used to evaluate and designate events that have developed in past experience. Automatic thoughts are characterized by their curtailed nature and their inability to be subject to conscious control. They are experienced as an axiom, a truth that cannot be disputed, like the words of parents heard by small, trusting children. Thus, a student who is terrified of an exam “automatically” evaluates a bad grade as a “complete failure.” Distortion of the assessment of the external situation.