In addition to all its other effects depression can cause impairment in people's cognitive functioning, particularly in the areas of decision-making and memory. Cognitive remediation which aims to improve cognitive functioning by using targeted, repetitive exercises has been shown to help schizophrenia patients with similar cognitive problems and a study of 46 people in Canada found that using a computerized cognition retraining package for 10 weeks helped people with depression to improve their attention, verbal learning and memory, co-ordination and decision-making although it did not improve their depression which still needed to be tackled with the appropriate therapy and drugs.
Elgamal, Safa ... [et al] - Successful computer-assisted cognitive remediation therapy in patients with unipolar depression : a proof of principle study Psychological Medicine 2007, 37, 1229-1238
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