Psychological Disorders
Why disorders develop
Explain how the diathesis-stress model combines nature and stress.
Disorders usually have many causes, working together.
Biological factors:
- Faulty neurotransmission (chemical messengers in the brain): low activity of GABA is linked to anxiety; excess dopamine to schizophrenia; low serotonin to depression.
- Genes: disorders run in families, but they are linked to many genes, each with a small effect, not one gene per disorder.
Psychological factors: maternal deprivation (separation from the mother in early childhood), faulty parenting (rejection, overprotection, harsh discipline), maladaptive family relationships, and severe stress.
Psychological models of abnormality:
| Model | Cause of disorder |
|---|---|
| Psychodynamic | unconscious conflicts, often from childhood |
| Behavioural | learned maladaptive behaviour, so it can be unlearned |
| Cognitive | irrational thinking, like overgeneralisation: drawing a broad negative conclusion from one event ('I failed one test, so I am a failure') |
| Humanistic-existential | blocked growth, loss of meaning in life |
Socio-cultural factors: war, prejudice and discrimination, unemployment, poverty, enmeshed families (where members are over-involved in each other's lives), social isolation, and even the labels themselves: once called 'mentally ill', a person may take on the sick role and be treated differently.
The diathesis-stress model brings these together:
- a diathesis: a biological predisposition (for example, inherited);
- a vulnerability to developing a disorder;
- pathogenic stressors: stressful events that trigger it.
A disorder appears when a predisposition meets stress. Two people with the same genes may differ: only the one who meets severe stress may develop the disorder.
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