Psychological Explanations For Explain Schizophrenia

• Schizophrenogenic mother

  Fromm-Reichmann (1948)

  •Mother is cold, controlling and rejecting; father is often passive•Leads to excessive stress and distrust as the family climate is characterised by tension and secrecy.•This triggers psychotic thinking and paranoid delusions, and ultimately schizophrenia
• Double- Blind Theory

  Bateson et al. (1972)

  The child receives mixed messages and cannot do the right thing. When they get it wrong, they are punished with withdrawal of love.

  Leads to understanding the world as confusing and dangerous.

  This triggers disorganised thinking and paranoid delusions, and ultimately schizophrenia
• Expressed Emotion

  •The family shows exaggerated involvement in the life of the patient (including needless self-sacrifice), control, verbal criticism of the patient (occasionally including violence) and hostility towards the patient (including anger and rejection)•Leads to excessive stress beyond impaired coping mechanisms.•This triggers relapse in patients with schizophrenia and may trigger the onset in a person who is already vulnerable due to their genetic make-up (diathesis-stress model)
• Dysfunctional Thoughts

  •A cognitive explanation of schizophrenia suggests that it is due to abnormal information processing.•Dysfunctional thought processing = cognitive habits or beliefs that cause the individual to evaluate information inappropriately and produces undesirable consequences•Frith et al. (1992) identified two kinds of dysfunctional thought processing that could underlie some symptoms of schizophrenia:
• –Metarepresentation – this is the cognitive ability to reflect on thoughts and behaviour which allows us insight into our own intentions and goals. Dysfunction in this would disrupt our ability to recognise our own actions and thoughts as being carried out by ourselves rather than someone else. This explains auditory hallucinations and delusions like thought insertion.
• –Central control – this is the cognitive ability to suppress automatic responses while we perform deliberate actions instead. Dysfunction in this would lead to disorganised speech  and thought disorder as we are unable to suppress automatic thoughts and speech triggered by other thoughts. For example, schizophrenics tend to experience derailment of thoughts and spoken sentences because each word triggers associations, and the patient can’t suppress automatic responses to them.