The role of self-esteem deficits in depressive disorders

This paper reviews the status and significance of self-esteem deficits with in the most important theories of aetiology and maintenance of depressive d isorders. In particular, self-concept-deficits are an reported in detail in personality theories, in psychodynamic approaches, in Beck's cognitive the ory of depression as well as newer self-schema models, in the original and reformulated lear pled helplessness model and in Brown's sociological model of depression. The empirical evidence supporting the respective approaches is also briefly summarized. The finally described multidimensional models of self-esteem in depression emphazise once again the fore-mentioned roles of low self-esteem both as vunerablility factor as well as symptom or conse quence of the disorder. Besides some important conceptual extentions concer ning the notion of stability vs. lability of self-esteem these models are m ore suitable for an integration of empirical results from different theoret ical models.