psychological explanations for schizophrenia

Question 1

psychological explaantions

Answer 1

• family dysfunction
• cognitive explanation

Question 2

Family Dysfunction

Answer 2

childhood & adulthood experiences of living in a dysfunctional family which could include poor family communication, cold parenting & high levels of expressed emotion

Question 3

Family Dysfunction: schizophrenic mother

Answer 3

• Fromm-Reichmann (1948): proposed a psychodynamic explanation based on accounts from her patients about childhood
  
  • noticed that many spoke of a particular type of parent (Schizophrenic mother)
• schizophrenogenic: schizophrenia causing
  
  • schizophrenogenic mother is cold, rejecting & controlling and tends yo create a family climate characterised by tension and secrecy
  • leads to distrust that later develops into paranoid delusions and eventually schizophrenia

Question 4

Family Dysfunction: double-bind theory

Answer 4

• Bateson et al (1972): emphasised the role of communications style within a family
• child finds themselves trapped in situations where they fear doing the wrong thing but receive mixed messages about what this is & feel unable to comment on the unfairness of the situation
• when the child gets it wrong they are punished by withdrawal of love
  
  • leaves them with a confused and dangerous understanding of the world
• reflected in symptoms such as disorganised thinking & paranoid delusion
• Bateson suggested it was just a risk factor

Question 5

Family Dysfunction: expressed emotion & schizophrenia

Answer 5

• expressed emotion is the level of emotion
  
  • especially negative emotion expressed towards patients via carers
• has several elements
  
  • verbal criticism (sometimes violence)
  • hostility (such as anger & rejection)
  • emotional over-involvement in their life (needless self-sacrifice)
• this emotion is a serious stress for the patient
• used as an explanation of relapse over schizophrenia & can also trigger someone vulnerable to schizophrenia (due to genetic makeup)

Question 6

Family dysfunction - AO3: Research support (S)

Answer 6

• Read et al (2005): reviewed 46 studies of child abuse & schizophrenia
  
  • concluded that 69% of adult women in patients had a history of sexual abuse, physical abuse or both in childhood
  • men it was 59%
  • information was gathered after the development of symptoms & it may have distorted memories which lowers the validity
• Tienari et al : followed up children following childhood experiences to see if childhood experience predicted any adult characteristics
• evidence was found & not a huge amount and results have been inconsistent which is more valid than looking back
• Berry et al: found that adults with insecure attachments to their primary caregiver are also more likely to have schizophrenia

Question 7

Family dysfunction - AO3: Explanations lack support (W)

Answer 7

• little evidence to support schizophrenic mother or double bind theory
• both are based on clinical observations of patients and early evidence involved assessing the mothers of patients for ‘crazy-making characteristics’
  
  • which is dated and unreliable

Question 8

Family dysfunction - AO3: Parent blaming (W)

Answer 8

• theories led to parent blaming
• parents had to deal with trauma of being blamed for the child’s condition on top of coping with the child having the mental condition & may need long term care
• shift from hospital to community-based care in the 80s may be a factor which led to a decline in family dysfunction

Question 9

Cognitive Explanations : dysfunctional thinking

Answer 9

• focused on mental processes such as thinking, language & attention
• associated with abnormal information processing
• characterised by disruption to normal thought processing
• Frith et al (1992): identified 2 kinds of dysfunctional thought processing that could underlie some symptoms

Question 10

Cognitive Explanations : metarepresentation

Answer 10

• cognitive ability to reflect on thoughts and behaviour
  - allows insight to our intentions & goals and to interpret the actions of others
  - disrupts our ability to recognise our own actions and thoughts as being carried out by ourselves than someone else

Question 11

Cognitive Explanations : central control

Answer 11

• ability to suppress automatic responses while we perform deliberate actions instead
  - disorganised speech & thought disorder could result from inability to suppress automatic thoughts & speech triggered by other thoughts
  - e.g - sufferers tend to experience derailment of thoughts & spoken sentences because each word triggers associations & cannot suppress automatic response

Question 12

Cognitive Explanations - AO3: Research support (S)

Answer 12

• evidence suggest information is processed differently in the mind of a schizophrenia sufferer
• Stirling et al (2006): compared 30 patients with schizophrenia with 18 non-patient controls on a range of cognitive tasks
  
  • such as the Stroop test - where ppts have to say the ink colour of the colour words
    
    • supressing the impulse to read words
  • schizophrenic patients took over twice as long
  • in line with Frith’s theory

Question 13

Cognitive Explanations - AO3: Proximal Explanation (W)

Answer 13

• links between symptoms and faulty cognitions are clear but it doesn’t tell us anything about the origins of the cognitions or of schizophrenia
• explains what causes the current symptoms but not the origin (distal causes)

Question 14

Cognitive Explanations - AO3: Psychological or Biological (W)

Answer 14

• evidence for biological factors isn’t considered
• psychological explanations can be hard to reconcile with bio explanations
• could be that both biological and psychological explanations can produce the same symptoms
  
  • raises the question of whether both outcomes are really schizophrenia
• may be more like diathesis-stress model where diathesis is biological or psychological