The interactionist approach to schizophrenia Flashcards
1
Q
What is the interactionist approach?
A
- An approach that acknowledges that there are biological, psychological and social factors in the development of schizophrenia
- Biological factors = genetic and neurochemistry
- Psychological = stress, life events and daily hassles
- social factors = poor interactions with family
2
Q
What is the diathesis - stress model?
A
diathesis = vunerability
Stress is a trigger to those who have a vunerability to schizophrenia and the onset of schizophrenia is caused by stress
3
Q
What is Meehl’s model?
A
- Meehl’s diathesis model is enetirely genetic and states that vunerability to schizophrenia is caused by a single schizogene
- This led to the schizotypic personality, one characteristic that is sensitive to stress
- Meehl stated that if a person has no schizogene then no amount of stress would lead to schizophrenia
- However if carriers of the gene experience trauma and stress it could lead to schizophrenia
4
Q
What is the modern understanding of diathesis?
A
- Ripke identified that there is not one single schizogene
- There are many factors beyond genetic such as psychological trauma. Therefore trauma can be the diathesis rather than the stressor
- Read proposed that a neurodevelopmental model in which early trauma alters the brain
- If trauma is early and severe enough it can cause the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal system to be overactive making a person more vunerable to stress
5
Q
What is the modern understanding of stress?
A
- stress is now not limited to psychological and instead that can be anything that risks triggering schizophrenia
- For example, cannabis use can be a stressor and increases the risk of schizophrenia by up to 7 times according to the dose
- This is because cannabis intereferes with the dopamine system
6
Q
What are treatments according to the interactionist model?
A
- acknowledeges the biological and psychological factors in schizophrenia
- Turkington pointed out that CBT can still be used to relieve symptoms despite believing in biological causes of schizophrenia
- Therefore a combination of antipsychotic medication and CBT can be used
7
Q
What is a strengths of the interactionist approach?
A
- There is evidence supporting the role of vunerability and triggers
- Tienari followed 19,000 Finnish children whose biological mothers had been diagnosed with schizophrenia
- in adulthood, they were compared to a control group of adoptees with no family history of schizophrenia
- Child rearing styles were assessed and it was found that high levels of criticism, hostility and low levels of empathy were associated with the development of schizophrenia but only in the high genetic risk group
- This shows a combination of genetic vunerability and stress can lead to a greater risk of schizophrenia
- Another stress is that the interactionist approach combines biology and psychological treatments. This has led to the combination of drug treatments and psychological therapies
- Tarrier randomly allocated 315 participants to medication + CBT, Medication + counselling and a control with just medication
- participants in the two combination groups showed lower symptoms than the control however there was no difference in hospital readmission
C = Jarvis and Okami pointed out that saying that a successful treatment for metal disorders justifies an explanation is a logical error called the treatment - causation fallacy. We can not assume that just because a combination of treatments is successful that the interactionist explanation is correct
8
Q
What is a limitation?
A
- over simplicity
- the original model by Meehl identified one single schizogene that was responsible for risk and only portrayed stress as due to schizophrenogenic parenting
- stress comes in many forms including biology, psychological
- Houston found that childhood sexual abuse was a major influence to vunerability to schizophrenia and cannabis was a major trigger
- This shows that the diathesis - stress model is more complex than thought of
