Psychological Explanations of Schizophrenia

Psychodynamic Theory

Freud saw schizophrenia as an infantile state which is cause by regression to a pre-ego stage in childhood
Regression is an ego defense mechanism - people may regress to an earlier type of behavior when they suffer a traumatic experiance
Having returned to a stage before the ego formed the schizophrenic individual has not developed a realistic awareness of the external world
Manifest symptoms express this state including delusions of grandeur and auditory halluscinations
Freud explains it as an attempt to re-establish ego control which has been lost as a consequence of harsh parenting
Laing's study of "Sanity and Madness" can be used to examplify this point
Other psychologists support idea of dysfunctional family patterns, eg Fromm-Reichmann saw that schizophrenogenic mothers or families who are over protective as important influence for the development of schizophrenia
Oltmann et al - parents of schizophrenia children do act different to parents of other kinds of patients

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Focus on the impaired thought processes that characterise schizophrenia
Supported by poor performance of schizophrenia sufferers on information processing such as visual tracking, short term memory, and reaction time
Such models do not explain how schizophrenia originated in the first place

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Stressful life events such as the death of close relatives or the breakdown of established relationships have been linked to there being higher risk of the onset of schizophrenia
Supported by Brown and Birley who found that schizophrenia sufferers reported having twice as many stressful life events prior to an episode of schizophrenia than a healthy control group
Vanos suggests that there are no links between life events and schizophrenia onset
It is alsio suggested that the onset of schixophrenia may be the cause of some stressful life events rather than the other way round, eg losing a job due to schizophrenic characteristics

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Bateson's "Double Bind" theory suggests children who recieve messages from parents which were ambivelent or contradictory were more likely to develop schizophrenia
Berger found schizophrenia sufferers more likely to remember double bind statement than non sufferers
Leam found no different between families with and without schizophrenia sufferers

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