Psychological explanation

• Family dysfunction looks at problems with processes within the family such as lack of communication, cold parenting, or the negative emotion expressed to a person.
• The characteristics of other family members has been put forward as a contributing factor for development of schizophrenia.
• • Fromm-Reichman. Idea of a schizophrenogenic mother.
  • Has its roots in the psychodynamic approach
  • Accounts were obtained about childhood in patients which suggests that schizophrenic causing mothers (cold, rejecting and controlling, dominating, perfectionist, moralistic and insensitive) were the reason that his patients developed schizophrenia.
  • Lived in an environment that had tension and secrecy, which led to distrust and later paranoid delusions, ending in schizophrenia.
• Bateson et al also suggested that contradictory situations children are placed in by parents can lead to symptoms, e.g. asking a child to be more spontaneous, but by being spontaneous, the child is confused as the child is doing the opposite of what was being asked.

  • become confused and uncertain, and then socially withdraw and become emotionally flat.
• Others emphasise the role of communication within the family, trapped in situations whre they fear doing the wrong thing, unable to comment or seek clarification.

  • reflected in disorganised thinking and paranoid delusions
• Expressed emotions by carers or family members linked to schizophrenia includes: negative emotion, verbal criticism and sometimes violence.

  This can be very stressful for the individual on the receiving end. Often used as an explanation for relapse and is also used for the interactionist approach in the diathesis stress model.
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  Strength- Supporting evidence

  • Read et al
  • Review linked insecure attachment and childhood trauma with schizophrenia, finding that adults with schizophrenia are more likely to have types C or D
  • Also found that 69% women and 59% men had a history of physical and/or sexual abuse.
  • Suggests family dysfunction makes you more vulnerable to schizophrenia
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  • There is a lot of evidence for childhood family stress but not so much for the schizophrenogenicmother
  • Accounts from patients is based on clinical observation or the patient and informal evidence of the mother's personality which further limits the explanation
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  • Socially sensitive as it can lead to parent blaming, mothers in particular, who may already be stressed watching their child go through a mental illness
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  Cognitive explanations look at dysfunctional thinking and disruptions to thought processing. A lower than usual level of information processing suggests cognitive impairment. Cognitive deficits occur when sufferers experience problems with attention, communication and information overload.
• Frith identified two main types of cognitive dysfunction:

  1. Metarepresentation dysfunction - ability to reflect on thoughts and behaviour. Disruption affects ability to distinguish our own thoughts and actions as being carried out by ourselves rather than someone else. Explains thought insertion.
  2. Central control dysfunction - speech poverty and thought disorder could result from inability to suppress automatic thoughts triggered by others. Derailment can occur when each word triggers assosciations.
• *A person with derailment talks in chains of only semi related ideas. Their ideas often fall further and further from the topic of conversation.
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  Supporting evidence

  • Sterling et al
  • Compared 30Ps with schizophrenia with a control group 30 on cognitive tasks such as the Stroop test.
  • Task requires the ability to suppress the tendency to read the words out loud
  • The schizophrenic group took twice as long to read the font colours and name them
  • Suggests the thought that processes are impaired
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  • contrast with other factors such as biological
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  Implications for treatment

  Family therapy has been developed to help expressed emotion, communication and coping between members of the family