Fromm-Richmann came up with a explanation for schizo using her patients accounts of their childhood, she found a common parent which is now called the schizophrenic mother, meaning schizo causing. described as cold and rejecting which creates a tense and secret family, later causing paranoid delusions + schizo
Bateson (1972) emphasised role of communication style within the family
The child often finds themselves trapped in situations where they fear doing the wrong thing but aren't sure what the right thing is and feel unable to ask for clarification
When they then get it wrong they are punished and experience withdrawal of love
Leaves them seeing the world as confusing and dangerous and leads to disorganised thinking and paranoid delusions - serves as a risk factor but not a definitive cause
Level of emotion expressed towards a patient by their carers
Consists of verbal criticism, hostility towards the patient and emotional over-involvement in the life of the patient eg: needless sacrifice
These severe causes of stress can lead to onset of SZ when paired with genetic vulnerability (diathesis stress model) and can lead to a relapse on a patient.
Propose that abnormalities in cognitive function are a key component of schizophrenia. eg, low activity in the ventral stratium has seen to be linked with negative symptoms and reduced activity in the gyrus results in hallucinations. these suggest cognition is impaired.
frith suggested, metarepresentation- cognitive ability to reflect on own thoughts and goals and recognise them as your own, dysfunction of this explains hallucinations eg voices in head.
central control- ability to supress autonomic responses to perform deliberate actions instead. dysfunction can explain disorganised speech as each spoken word creates a new thought which cannot be supressed.
A03: supporting family dysfunction a s a risk factor
read- found 69% of women who had schizophrenia also had a past of physical or sexual abuse in their childhood and 59% in males. also those with insecure attachments with primary care giver were more likely.
BUT shares the same weakness, the recall of childhood could of been distorted by the schizo symptoms and reducing validity, has been longitudinal studies but results have been inconsistent
there is very little evidence for schizophrenic mothers and the double blind theory, this is because it is no longer tolerated by parents and hospitals are no longer allowed to talk about it. this is due to the parents already suffering from seeing their child develop schizo and then go through the trauma of being blamed,
used to be determined by parents undergoing personality tests to see for ' crazy making characteristics
A03: strong evidence for dysfunctional information processing
evidence that supports cognitive processes happen differently in the mind of a suffer. Stirling compared 30 patients with 18 non patients using the stop test, to see if the schizo suffers could supress the desire to read to word instead of saying the colour. found that they took twice as long as the control, supporting the central control idea of frith.
BUT doesn't tell us the origin of the condition only the causes of the symptoms. and could the symptom cause the dysfunction.