What causes Psychopathology?

Is is in the genes, is it my parents or my personality?

Mental disorder's causes are multi factorial. It means that there are various causes to any given mental disorder. This is better understood with Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems. This theory is one of the simplest and straight forward ones. Basically it says that individuals receive influences and feedbacks from their actions from the different layers of the environment.
Each of these layers have an effect on a child’s development.

First of all: the individual him/herself is born with strengths and difficulties inherited by the genetical history and also birth situations ( lacking of oxygen, premature babies...).

Then, the microsystem has an enormous impact on the development of insecurities, self-esteem, attachment patterns and so on. The microsystem is the close family.

When kids enter school they enter the mesosystem which is also composed of all the other influences parents might have such as religion, working conditions... which will have an indirect impact on the childs development.

The culture a child is raised in, his community and the neighborhood he lives in are all part of the exosystem.

The macrosystem is composed of the values, laws and political beliefs of society.

Finally, the chronosystem refers to the dimension of time.
Elements within this system can be either external events, such as the timing of a parent’s death, or internal developments, such as the physiological changes that occur with the aging of a child.


How does it work?

Every layer, starting with external ones, have an influence on all the other layers. For
example, if it is the belief of the culture that parents should be solely responsible for raising their children, that culture is less likely to provide resources to help parents. This, in turn, affects the structures in which the parents function. The parents’ ability or inability to carry out that responsibility toward their child within the context of the child’s microsystem is likewise affected.

One thing to remember also is that the younger the child, the stronger these effects are.

This is an extremely good reason to take good care of every single child and to give the best help possible to struggling parents.

Many mental disorders are due to lack of security in the first years of life. When mother and father live recurrent stress ( working conditions, lack of social support, etc) the infant feels it and is tremendously affected by it. Babies are very strong and try hard to cope with environmental difficulties so they adapt to that stress. In other words they become slowly much more demanding to make shure they get their parents attention and they act out.
Mommy and daddy are already stressed so baby might get punished, harshly beaten or even abandoned.
This will cause what psychologists call an attachment disorder, which is one of the strongest links to later mental disorder. But that will be the subject of my next entry.

If you are a young parent and you recognize yourself on these lines, please reach for help, take some free time for yourself. Your baby and the rest of society will benefit of your good health.

Ale