Family dysfunction

• The Family Dysfunction Explanation of Schizophrenia

  Family conflict leads to stress and confusion in individuals, which causes the development of schizophrenia.

  Both positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia can develop over time.
• double bind 


  A double bind is when someone experiences contradictory messages, confusing them on how they should behave.

  A double bind is a very stressful experience, that can lead to the development of schizophrenia.
• High Degree of Expressed Emotion


  Members of a family speak to each other in negative ways, consistently expressing lots of criticism and complaints about what everyone else is doing.
• Limitations of Family Dysfunction: individual differences

  Altorfer et al

  • found individual differences in responses to expressed emotion amongst people with schizophrenia
  • 1/4 all schizophrenic people had no stress response to high degree of expressed emotion aimed towards them
• Limitations to Family Dysfunction: unreliable

  • Interviews with people with schizo may lack objectivity
  • self-report method not suitable for participants with dysfunctional mental processes
• Vaughn And Leff:

  • found people with schizophrenia more likely to relapse if they experienced a high degree of expressed emotion after being discharged from hospital:
  • observational technique to collect data on relationships between people with schizophrenia and their families
  • They did this by observing recently discharged patients interacting with their family, and categorising those interactions as either low or high expressed emotion.
• Family Therapy

  • psychological therapy
  • involves parents + patient
  • aim: reduce family conflict

  1. Explaining
  2. Coping Mechanism
  3. changing style of communication
• Study Support of Family Therapy: Pharoah et al

  •  Pharoah et al.’s review aimed to investigate the effectiveness of combining family therapy and medication.
  •  found that those who received family therapy were more likely to take their medication consistently.
  • Hoever less evidence to show reduce patients mental health 
• STRENGTH of Family Therapy

  Less likely to relapse and  reducing no. patients going back to hospital so cost effective for NHS
• LIMITATIONS of Family Therapy

  • Many of the studies that said they’d used random allocation hadn’t actually used it. This meant that participant variables weren’t controlled .
  • Some studies may have lacked objectivity.
  • Many studies did not control for participant variables.