Psychological Explanations + treatments

• Family Dysfunction

  1. schizophrenogenic mother: this is when the mother is cold and rejecting in the family. This leads to hostility and secrecy within the household. As a result, the child will be paranoid in the outside world and will be mor likely to get sz
• Family Dysfunction

  2. Double bind theory: This is where the child is shown conflicting emotions by their family. They will be scared to do anything wrong because they will receive a withdrawal of love and experience hostility. This will result in them having a confusing and distorted perception of the world and experience sz.
• Family Dysfunction

  3. Expressed Emotions: Negative emotions are expressed towards the child through verbal abuse (sometimes physical) and overinvolvement. This causes a lot of stress and explains relapse because they are 4x more likely to relapse.
• Family Dysfunction EVALUATION

  P- Research to support that insecure attachments and childhood trauma are risk factors to sz

  E- Adults with sz usually have type c (insecure resistant attachment).

  69% of women and 59% of men have reported physical or sexual abuse as a child.
• Family Dysfunction EVALUATION


  P- Explanations lack support

  E-Even though trauma at a young age that stems from family may contribute to sz, there's no sufficient evidence to show that expressed emotion and schizophrenogenic mother cause sz.
• Cognitive Thinking

  1. Dysfunctional thinking: A disruption in normal thought processing and impaired cognition: reduced thought in the ventral striatum= negative symptoms like loosing ability to speak fluently. reduced info processing in cingulate gangri= positive symptoms like hallucinations.
• Cognitive Thinking 


  2. Meta representation- this is the ability to reflect on the actions of yours and others. if someone has meta representation dysfunction, then they wont be able to tell that their actions are caused by them and so they will be prone to hallucinations and having thoughts placed in the mind by others
• Cognitive Thinking 


  3. Central control dysfunction: This is the ability to suppress the automatic thoughts you may get when doing or speaking about something deliberately. Thus, they will have word poverty and derailment as a result of too many triggers of word association.
• Cognitive Thinking Evaluation:

  P- Research support for dysfunctional thought processing

  E- The performance of doing the stroop test was compared between 30 ppl with sz and 18 non participants.

  E- they found that the sz group took twice as long to supress the impulse of calling out the word written and say the acc colour instead.
• Cognitive Thinking Evaluation:

  P- Only a partial explanation

  E- this theory is a proximal explanation because it talks about oresnt symptoms whereas we need a more distal explanation, which tell us what imitially caused the condition (eg; family dysfunction or genes)
• CBT

  • takes 5-20 lessons that talks about how to combat cognitive thoughts and behaviour
  • Helps patients come to terms with how their condition and how it impacts their thoughts and behaviour. For example, when a patient is having irrational thoughts and they think that a demon is speaking to them , their therapist will tell them that is it just the dysfunctional speech centres in their own brain.
• Family Therapy:

  • Aim is to improve communication between family and caters towards the psychological theories of family dysfunction
  • the strategies include reducing negative symptoms to remove stress and improving family's ability to help by forming an alliance and agreeing on the aims of therapy.
• Family Therapy: Model of Practice

  1. sharing info
  2. identifying how the family can help and the resources to do so
  3. encouraging mutual understanding and safe space to express info
  4. identifying unhelpful patterns of behaviour
  5. skills training e.g stress management
  6. relapse preventing planning
  7. maintenance planning for future.