Download Schizophrenia Psychological Explanations File

Summary Sheet
Schizophrenia: Psychological Explanations
Psychodynamic Explanation
 Schizophrenia is caused by a problem with an ego defence mechanism called regression.
 Freud believed that if a child is raised by cold and uncaring parents, their Ego will attempt to protect
them from the trauma this causes.
 To do this it employs the defence mechanism of regression, which is when a person
psychologically reverts back to a past stage in their development.
 The person in a cold and uncaring environment will have a weak Ego, and so, in dealing with
the huge demands placed on t by employing its defence mechanisms, the Ego shatters, leaving the
Id in charge of the sufferer’s personality.
 The person becomes totally focused on themselves, to such an extent that they lose all touch with
reality. This is the cause of the visual and auditory hallucinations of schizophrenia.
Evaluation
 Androcentric, heaping much of the blame on the mothers of schizophrenics.
 Research has found that the parents of the vast majority of schizophrenic sufferers are not
cold and uncaring as Freud described them, but sensitive and caring individuals, scared and
devastated by their child’s illness.
 So far, there have been no real breakthroughs with sufferers of schizophrenia who have
undergone psychodynamic therapy.
Family systems theory
 Another psychodynamic explanation
 Fromm-Reichman (1948) proposed that schizophrenia was caused by ‘schizophrenogenic
families’ and in particular a schizophrenogenic mother (a mother who causes
schizophrenia). The mothers, she suggested, seem to convey conflicting messages to the
child.
 They were often rejecting of the child, but still demanded that the child show emotional
expression and were dependent on the mother at all times.
 Repeated exposure to such contradictory messages causes the child to resort to selfdeception and to develop a false concept of reality and an inability to communicate
effectively.
Evaluation
 As with the traditional psychodynamic explanation, it may be the case that the disturbed
behaviour in the family is not the cause of a child developing schizophrenia, but rather that
the disturbed behaviour in the family is the result of the family having a schizophrenic in
their midst.
Summary Sheet
Cognitive Explanations
 Whilst a number of different cognitive explanations have been put forward, they all have in
common the idea that schizophrenia is caused by disorganised thinking.
 Interest has centred on the role of attention, the possibility being that people with
schizophrenia cannot filter out irrelevant information and thus become overwhelmed
with data they cannot interpret and experience a sensory word different to that experienced
by others.
 For Frith (1979; 1992), this accounts for the positive symptoms of schizophrenia, such
as delusions, auditory hallucinations and disorganised speech.
 According to Helmsley (1993) stored information is used to create schemata permitting
individuals to interpret and deal with current situations, but in people with schizophrenia,
due to the breakdown in cognitive processing these schemata are not activated,
sensory overload occurs and sufferers cannot determine what to attend to and what to
ignore, leading to delusional thinking.
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Evaluation
If schizophrenics have an attentional problem then they would have difficulty doing tasks
that require focused attention. However, schizophrenics do not seem to be any easier to
distract than normal, when engaged on cognitive tasks (Mckenna, 1994).
Schizophrenics clearly have disordered thoughts, but it is debatable whether this is a cause
of the disorder or a symptom of it.
Whilst cognitive theories appear to explain many of the positive symptoms of schizophrenia
satisfactorily, they don’t adequately explain negative symptoms.
McKay et al (1996) point out that a lack of experimental support has resulted in the
attention deficit theory being abandoned by most researchers. Most cognitive research now
focuses on explaining specific symptoms of schizophrenia rather than the disorder as a
whole.
Psychological Explanations: General evaluation
 Plenty of evidence for the importance of biological factors underlying schizophrenia (choose
one or two examples)
 ‘Diathesis-Stress Model’ as a theory that integrates Psychological and Biological
explanations.