3) Schizophrenia - Psychological Explanations Flashcards
What are the Psychological explanations for schizophrenia?
- Family dysfunction
- Cognitive explanations
What is family dysfunction as an explanation for schizophrenia?
- Abnormal processes within a family.
- May be risk factors for both the development and maintenance of schizophrenia.
How many family dysfunction explanations are there?
3
What are the three family dysfunction explanations?
- The schizophrenogenic mother
- Double-bind theory
- Expressed emotion
What is the schizophrenogenic mother explanation for schizophrenia?
- Fromm-Reichmann proposed a psychodynamic explanation for schizophrenia based on the accounts she heard from her clients about their childhood.
- Many of her clients spoke of a particular type of parent, being the schizophrenogenic mother. Meaning schizophrenia-causing.
- The schizophrenogenic is cold, rejecting and controlling and tend to create a family climate characterised by tension and secrecy.
- This leads to distrust which leads to paranoid delusions and then schizophrenia.
What are the characteristics of the schizophrenogenic mother?
- Cold
- Rejecting
- Controlling
- Tend to create a family climate characterised by tension and secrecy.
How schizophrenogenic mothers lead to schizophrenia?
This leads to distrust which leads to paranoid delusions and then schizophrenia.
What is the double bind theory for explaining schizophrenia?
- Bateson emphasised the importance of communication style within a family .
- The developing child regularly finds themselves trapped in situations where they fear doing the wrong thing but receive mixed messages about what this is and feel unable to comment on the fairness of this situation or seek clarification.
- When they get it wrong, the child is often punished with the withdrawal of love.
- This leaves them with an understanding of the world as confusing and dangerous.
- This is reflected in symptoms such like disorganised thinking and paranoid delusions.
- Bateson was clear in saying that this was just a risk factor, not the main type of communication in the family of a person with schizophrenia nor the only factor involved on developing schizophrenia.
What happens when a child “does the wrong thing” in the double bind theory?
- The child is punished by the withdrawal of love by their parents.
- Leaves them an understanding of the world as being confusing and dangerous.
Which symptoms are reflected by the double-bind theory?
- Disorganised thinking
- Paranoid delusions
What is the expressed emotion explanation of schizophrenia?
- Expressed emotion is the level of emotion, particularly negative emotion, expressed towards a person with schizophrenia by their
carers.
EE contains several elements:
- Verbal criticism of the person, occasionally accompanied by violence.
- Hostility towards the person, including anger and rejection.
- Emotional over-involvement in the life of the person, including needless self-sacrifice.
- These high levels of expressed emotion in carers directed towards the person are a serious source of stress for the patient.
- This is primarily the explanation for relapse in people with schizophrenia.
- This stress can also trigger the onset of schizophrenia.
What are the two kinds of dysfunctional thought processing involved in the cognitive explanations of schizophrenia, identified by Frith?
Metarepresentation and Central control
What is metarepresentation as a kind of dysfunctional thought processing?
- The cognitive ability to reflect on thoughts and behaviour.
- This allows insight into our own intentions and goals and allows us to interpret the actions of others.
- Dysfunction of this would disrupt our ability to recognise our own actions and thoughts as being carried out by ourselves rather than someone else.
- This would explain hallucinations of voices and delusions.
What is Central control as a kind of dysfunctional thought processing?
- The cognitive ability to suppress automatic responses while we perform deliberate actions instead.
- Disorganised speech and thought disorder could be the result from the inability to supress automatic thoughts and speech triggered by other thoughts.
e.g:
People with schizophrenia tend to experience derailment of thoughts and spoken sentences because each word triggers associations, and the person cannot suppress automatic responses to these.
Give a strength for family dysfunction as a risk factor.
P - There is supporting evidence which suggests that family relationships in childhood are associated with increased risk of schizophrenia in adulthood.
E - Read et al reviewed 46 studies of child abuse and schizophrenia and concluded that 69% of adult women in-patients with a diagnosis of schizophrenia had a history of physical abuse, sexual abuse or both in childhood.
For men this figure was 59%.
Insecurely attached adults are also more liekly to have schizophrenia.
E - This shows that there is a large body of evidence which points towards family dysfunction and schizophrenia.
CA - However, infromation about childhood experiences was gathered after the development of symptoms and schizophrenia may have distorted the patients recall of childhood experiences.
This reduced the validity of the theory.
E - Although Tienari et al carried out a follow up study, following children from childhood experiences to see if their childhood experiences predicted any characteristic.
L - There is positive evidence linking family dysfunction to schizophrenia but not a huge amount and results have been inconsistent.
