Evaluation

• Usefulness - Medical Model

  • Highly useful due to the effective treatments- Drug Therapy
  • May lack usefulness as it doesn’t consider that there may be a situational cause, very focused on biological abnormalities (reductionist)
• Scientific - Medical Model

  • The explanations and treatments are based on a biological basis and can be measures and treated in an objective manner, aiming to treat the root natural cause.
  • However, the cause and effect of disorders like depression is still not established
• Reductionism/Holism - Medical Model

  • Reductionist as it only considers biological and innate causes of mental illnesses
  • However, the monoamine hypothesis for explaining depression is holistic as it considers how a traumatic life event can lead to a change in chemical levels such as serotonin, dopamine and noradrenaline.
• Determinism/Free will - Medical Model

  • The biomedical explanations explain how mental illness is pre-determined by a root biological abnormality, therefore our behaviour is somewhat out of our control.
  • However, we can exercise our free will in order to engage with biological treatments to try and address the innate cause of our behaviour
• Nature/Nurture - Medical Model

  • This explanation focuses on innate, natural causes of mental illness
  • The monoamine hypothesis considers how stressful life events can play a part
• Individual/Situational - Medical Model

  • Mostly individual differences e.g. chemical imbalances and genetic uniqueness,
  • However, the monoamine focuses on how our situation can perpetuate the chemical imbalance we experience in people with depression.
• Ethics - Medical Model

  • The treatment of schizophrenia causes harmful and emotionally damaging side effects, such as stiffness, memory loss and slurred speech.
  • However, consent has to be gained from doctors before any treatment can be administered.
• Socially Sensitive - Medical Model

  • There may be stigma and labelling caused by claiming that people have an innate disposition to certain mental illnesses.
  • However, this also raises awareness of the genetic and chemical root causes of certain disorders.
  • Also, the treatments such as ECT are very controversial due to the side effects. People also may be embarrassed for being on anti-psychotic drugs
• Validity - Medical Model

  • There is a lack of generalisability in Gottesman’s research due to the fact that all of the sample was Danish and from a western country, therefore the study lacked population validity
  • Low internal validity as Gottesman cannot be sure that each participant was diagnosed correctly so is not truly measuring genetic concordance.
• Reliability - Medical Model

  • All of the biological treatments are conducted in a standardised and consistent manner with every schizophrenia patient
  • Gottesman used a standardised measure of his participants in order to check for consistency of concordance rates between the 4 groups