Component 3: Issues in Mental Health - Alternatives to the Medical Model Flashcards
What is the behaviourist explaination of mental illness?
Processes of learning can be used to explain the origin of mental disorder. In other wirds, abnormal behaviour is assumed to be learned in the same way as any other type of behaviour. This occurs through classical and operant conditioning.
What is classical conditioning?
This happens when an emotional response such as fear or anxiety becomes associated with a particular neutral stimulus.
What is operant conditioning?
This explains how the consequences of different behaviours shape subsequent behaviour. Humans learn by consequence: when behaviour is reinforced through rewards it is more likely to be repeated. Conversely, behaviour that is punished is less likely to be repeated.
What is the behaviourist explanation of phobias?
E.g. Little Albert study
Classical conditioning can explain how phobias are aquired but not how individuals continue to be fearful and avoid the object. Operant conditioning may provide an explanation.
When an individual responds fearfully to stimulus, they gain sympathy and attention which may be rewarding and reinforce behaviour.
By avoiding the object, the individual will reduce their fear response. This reinforces the continued avoidance as it reduces the unpleasant feeling.
What is the cognitive explanation of mental illness?
The cognitive account of mental illness is more concerned with the processes of thinking, attention and perception that underlie abnormal behaviour. They examine mental disorder through irrational or maladaptive beliefs. Essentially, this explanation relies on the idea that the cognitions of a person with mental illness are somehow faulty. It is the way they think and perceive situations that causes difficulty rather than the situation itself. A person who tends to think negatively will make associated thinking biases or errors that warp emotions and behaviour.
What is cognitive distortion or irrational thinking?
When an individual forms an inaccurate perception of reality that may be highly negative or disturbed. There is nothing deliberate or controlled about cognitive distortion, it occurs automatically.
What is the cognitive explanation of depression?
Beck suggests that maladaptive thinking patterns form in childhood, as we aquire information about aspects of the world. This is known as schema development.
Depression involves a traid of negative schemas. Early experiences from disfunctional beliefs which may then be triggered by adverse life events and activate the underlying assumptions. From then on, incoming information is processed with a negative bias.
What is Beck’s negative triad?
Negative views about the world
Negative views about oneself
Negative views about the future
What is the tripartite personality?
The id (innate part of personality that demands immediate satisfaction of our impulses and desires)
The ego (develops not long after birth and it the logical, rational part of the personality)
The superego (develops a few years after birth and is essentially our conscience)
What are ego defence mechanisms?
Repression - the unconscious blocking of unpleasant emotions, impulses and memories from your conscious mind
Displacement - when a person redirects a negative emotion from its original source to a less threatening source.
Regression - return of the ego to an earlier stage of development cgaracterised by age-inappropriate behaviours and impulses.
What is the psychodynamic explanation of depression?
Freud believed that depression closely resemble grief. In psychodynamic terms, a loss can be real or symbolic. Sometimes a response to loss can be pathological because it is excessive and persistent.
A key feature that distinguishes depression from grief is self hatred. This experience of loss is anger turned inward. This originates from experiences in childhood where a child cannot outwardly express feelings out of guilt or fear of punishment. Anger becomes repressed turning anger inward and the process of self hatred begins.
Depression occurs in adulthood when an adult experiences a loss and they rexperience the repressed unconcious feelings of self directed anger and loss from childhood.
What is the psychodynamic explanation for phobias?
If a person experiences anxiety this is a threat to the ego. One way to resolve this is to displace it onto an initially neutral object or situation. This then represents the real feared object.
Summarise Szaz’s research article ‘The Myth of Mental Illness’
Szaz suggested that mental disorders were behaviours that made people feel uncomfortable and therfore thought by society to need treating to make other people feel better rather then help the person displaying the behaviours. He believed people with mental illness should be treated in the medical sense.
His article looks at his initial research from the 1960s
What were Szaz’s points in the 1960s?
- Health care for mental health consited of mental hospitals and private professionals
- Mental patients are treated no better than prisoners. Patients have few rights e.g. held against their will
- mental illness is not the same as physical illness
- Mental illness doesn’t exist so it is foolish to look for causes or cures
What were Szaz’s reconsiderations in 2010?
- All mental health care is provided by the NHS and the aim is to prevent danger to patients and others
- A false belief that is apparent in research is that mental illness can be diagnosed accurately and treated successfully
- Mental illness is seen as a disorder of the brain, despite their being no scientific evidence that it is caused soley by the brain
- Mental disorders are labels given to people with undersirable behaviours
- Doctors don;t see people as inherently bad, but if they perform negative behaviours, it is a result of their mental illness
- Consent for treating mental illness does not happen
- Medical treatments should not be used to treat mental illness. People need to be helped to overcome obstabcles and treated with respect.
