So far, polarized proton beams have never been accelerated to energies higher than 25 GeV. During the acceleration process, the beam polarization is quite undisturbed, when the accelerator is well adjusted, except at first-order depolarizing spin orbit resonances. At some accelerators other effects have been observed but first-order resonances have always been dominant. At these resonances the spin tune plus or minus one of the orbit tunes is an integer. These beams have usually been investigated by theories which correspondingly lead to an undisturbed polarization during acceleration, except at such resonances. Therefore we speak of ``first-order theories.'' The first frequently used first-order theory is the single resonance model, which is usually used for simulating the acceleration process. Here the equation of spin motion is simplified drastically by dropping all but the dominant Fourier component of the driving term of that differential equation. The second frequently used first-order theory, the linearized spin-orbit motion theory, is also quite crude. It is based on a linearization of the spin and orbit equation of motion with respect to the phase space coordinates and two suitably chosen spin coordinates. Because of linearization this method cannot be used close to resonances but at fixed energies it is a useful tool. It will be shown that the validity of these first-order theories is restricted at Hadron Electron Ring Accelerator (HERA) energies of up to 820 GeV. An overview of the available theories which go beyond the first-order resonances is given and we explain which of these approaches are applicable for the analysis of polarization in the HERA proton ring. Since these theories include more than one Fourier harmonic in the driving term of the equation of motion, we refer to them as ``non-first-order'' or ``higher-order'' theories. Finally, the higher-order effects observed while simulating polarized beams in HERA with these advanced methods are illustrated.