Psychological explanations for schizophrenia Flashcards
What are the psychological explanations of schizophrenia?
Family dysfunction
Cognitive explanations
Define family dysfunction
abnormal processes within the family such as poor communication are seen as risk factors for the development and maintenance of schizophrenia. Includes schizophrenogenic mother, double bind and expressed emotion
What is involved in the family dysfunction explanation?
The schizophrenogenic mother
Double-bind theory
Expressed emotion
Who came up with the schizophrenogenic mother?
Frieda Fromm-Reichmann (1948) - proposed a psychodynamic explanation for Schizophrenia based on accounts of patients from their childhoods.
What does schizophrenogenic mean?
Schizophrenia-causing
Describe the characteristics of a schizophrenogenic mother
The schizophrenogenic mother is cold, rejecting and controlling creating a climate of tension and secrecy within the family. Fromm suggested this leads to distrust which later develops into paranoid delusions and ultimately schizophrenia.
Who talks about double bind theory?
Bateson - Children who receive contradictory messages from their parents are more likely to develop schizophrenia.
What does Bateson say??
Schizophrenia is a reaction to a pathological parent presenting the child with a no win situation.
Explain double bind theory
This is created by contradictory communication between tone of voice and content. For example, a mother may say, ‘Come and give mummy a cuddle’, but then freezes when the child approaches, and then tells the child off for not being affectionate. This leads to a negative reaction of social withdrawal in order to escape double-bind situations.
What is the result of prolonged exposure to double bind
Prolonged exposure to such interactions leaves the child with an understanding of the world that is confusing and dangerous which is reflected in symptoms such as disorganised thinking and paranoid delusions.
Summary of Bateson’s double bind theory
- The child doesn’t know how to respond to the conflict between the words and the body language.
- If the child cannot resolve the confusion, then he/she is in a double bind situation.
- This causes confusion and leads to a state of internal conflict.
- Prolonged exposure to such interactions prevents the development of an internally coherent construction of reality.
Explain how double bind leads to schizophrenia?
The result is that children lose their grip on reality and if double bind messages are presented continually and habitually within the family context from infancy on by the time the child is old enough to have identified the double bind situation, it has already been internalised and the child is unable to confront it. The solution then is to create an escape from the conflicting logical demands of the double bind into the world of the delusions.
What is expressed emotion?
Expressed emotion is a family communication style / the level of negative emotion expressed to a person with sz by their carers who are often family members. Members of the family of a schizophrenic are critical of the patient, hostile towards the patients and show over-Involvement in the patients life.
What is the relationship between schizophrenia and expressed emotion?
A high degree of expressed emotion (EE) is associated with schizophrenia. A patient returning to a family with high EE is about four times more likely to relapse than a patient whose family is low in EE. (LINZEN)
Why is a schizophrenic patient returning to a family with high EE more likely to have a relapse?
This is because a schizophrenic patient has a low tolerance of intense emotional environments and the interactions in the high EE families lead to stress beyond the patients coping mechanisms which triggers a schizophrenic episode.
