Schizophrenia: Social Causation Flashcards
What is the social causation hypothesis?
The social causation hypothesis shows that the human world (people around you) is a major cause of schizophrenia (or at least of relapse).
What are the four key factors of social causation?
- Social adversity
- Urbanicity
- Social isolation
- Immigration and minority status
What is social adversity?
Social adversity, an umbrella term that refers to issues such asviolent crime, segregation, exposure to delinquent peers, poverty, and poor parenting.
Failure to meet needs and being in any of these circumstances can be stressful. This makes their problems worse.
What is urbanicity?
Urbanity is the link between urban living and schizophrenia.
City life is more stressful than rural life - noise, light pollution, criminality, faster pace, anonymity.
Long-term exposure may make a person more vulnerable to having an episode of schizophrenia.
What is social isolation?
People with schizophrenia often withdraw themselves from society because they see themselves as ‘weird’.
Self-imposed isolation cuts them off from feedback about what behaviours thoughts are inappropriate - they begin to behave ‘strangely’ without this corrective feedback.
What is immigration & minority status?
Immigrants are at greater risk of schizophrenia than the general population. Research shows greater risk for first- and second-generation immigrants in many countries.
Veling et al (2008) suggests schizophrenia may be a reaction to prejudice and discrimination. Second-generation immigrants are at greater risk than first-generation because:
- They have a weaker cultural identity.
- They have learned to fit in.
- Their beliefs and expectations may be at odds with those of their parents and extended family.
(Put simply, they find it hard to completely identify, culturally, with the country they live in, or the country they are from - which creates stress which worsens vulnerability to schizophrenia)
What is a strength of social causation + CA? (hint: urban environments schizo!, but correlation backwards!)
A strength of social causation is that there are meta-analyses supporting the role of urban dwelling.
Vassos et al. (2012) analysed data from four studies to correlate location (urban to rural) with schizophrenia risk an found that the risk was 2.37 times higher for people living in the most urban environments compared with the most rural
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[Vassos et al. (2012) analysed data from four studies to correlate location with schizophrenia risk, and found that the risk was higher for those living in urban environments.]
This shows that relative risk of schizophrenia increases in line with population density.
However, the social drift hypothesis suggests that schizophrenia causes urbanicity. It suggests that those with schizophrenia drift to cheap urban areas. This means that they get the benefits of a city but don’t have to pay as much for them.
What is another strength of social causation + CA? (hint: social identity/more veling…)
Another strength of social causation is that there is research into ethnic identity and schizophrenia.
Veling et al (2008) showed that Moroccan immigrants were more likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia than Turkish immigrants. This was correlated with the discrimination facd by each group.
This suggests that strong ethnic identity may be a protective factor against schizophrenia
What is a weakness of social causation?
A weakness of social causation is that it is not a complete explanation for schizophrenia.
Gottesman (1991) showed that there was a 48% concordance rate for schizophrenia in MZ twins and 17% for DZ twins, which shows that schizophrenia has a large genetic aspect.
This means that the social causation cannot fully explain schizophrenia, and rather environment may just be a trigger (diathesis-stress).
What is an application of social causation? (hint: can help treat schizos!)
An application of social causation is that it can be used to treat schizophrenia.
Social causation can help treat schizophrenia by drawing attention to factors affecting mental health (like Social adversity, Urbanicity, Social isolation and Immigration and minority status).
This means that we can develop an environment in which these issues are less of a problem.
