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Psychological explanations - Family Dysfunction - Coggle Diagram
Psychological explanations - Family Dysfunction
Sees maladaptive relationships and patterns of communications with families as sources of stress which can influence the development of schizophrenia
Parents of schizophrenics often display three types of dysfunctional characteristics :
High levels of interpersonal conflict
Difficulty communicating with each other
Being excessively critical and controlling of their children
Bateson developed the phrase double bind to explain the contradictory situations children could be placed in by parents, where a verbal message is given but opposite behaviour is exhibited
For example a parent may tell a child to be more spontaneous but if the child is then spontaneous it becomes confused because by following the order from the parent, they are therefore not being spontaneous
This leads to a negative reaction of social withdrawal and flat effect (lack of emotional expression) in order to escape double bind situations
Another feature of the theory is expressed emotion, where families who persistently exhibit criticism and hostility exert a negative influence.
This is especially the case for recovering schizophrenics who when returning to their families react to expressed emotion by relapsing to an active phase of the disorder and experience severe positive symptoms of hallucinations and delusions of persecution
Bateson - reported on a case study where a recovering schizophrenic was visited in hospital by his mother. He embraced her warmly but she stiffened and when he withdrew his arms she said 'Don't you love me anymore?'. He then blushed and she commented 'You must not be so easily embarrassed and afraid of your feelings. When she left he assaulted an aide and had to be restrained. Supports double bind
Tienari - the level of schizophrenia in adopted individuals who were the biological children of schizophrenic mothers was 5.8% in those adopted by healthy families compared with 36.8% for children raised in dysfunctional families. Suggests diathesis stress model
Patino - found 6 problems associated with family dysfunction. Migrants with at least 3 of these had 4 times the normal level of vulnerability to developing SZ
Poor relationship between adults in household
Lack of warmth between parents and child
Visible disturbance of the mother-child, father-child or sibling-child relationship
Parental overprotection
Child abuse
Evaluation
Having a schizophrenic within a family can be problematic and stressful on family relationships. Therefore rather than dysfunctions within families causing schizophrenia, it could be that having a schizophrenic within a family leads to dysfunction
Supported by the fact that therapies which successfully focus on reducing expressed emotions within families have low relapse rates compared with other therapies
Batesons idea of double bind was initially popular amongst clinicians but some have accused him of selective bias in focusing only on aspects of interviews with schizophrenics that supported his claims. This, coupled with more recent evidence supporting a genetic link, has lessened support for the idea
It fails to explain why all children in such families often do not go on to develop SZ - only 1% of the population have it
There is a lack of support for family dysfunction as a causal factor, it has been suggested that it plays a major role in the maintenance of the disorder