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

Psychopathology or being crazy

Psychopathology is the clinical word for what people used to call ( and sometimes still) being Crazy.
If you listen to the first video to your left, there is a very interesting testimony from a young woman diagnosed with bipolar disorder( we'll get to that later).

She explains the difference between having a mental disorder (or a psychopathology) and living a "normal" depression episode.
Symptoms might be similar, for example Dany is diagnosed with major depression, his symptoms are: loss of interest, drastic change in appetite and sleep, suicidal thoughts (amongst others). Dany feels demoralized and doesn't seek help. He's been feeling like this for almost 6 months.
Marianne's mother just died she now lost appetite and can't sleep at night, she doesn't want to go to school or see her best friends anymore, she even told her psychologist she misses her mother so much sometimes she would want to go meet her...

Dany and Marianne are living what psychologists call major depression.
To be called depression, these symptoms need to last for 6 to 24 months.


The difference between Dany's depression and Marianne's:
Dany's depression was not triggered by any stressful event. Dany would most probably be diagnosed with major depression and be prescribed antidepressants. Dany will have to take the drug for the rest of his life.
Marianne will also take drugs but she will slowly come back the way she used to be, as time and therapy goes by.
Anyone could live a depression the way Marianne did, but only a few will live with depression for the rest of their lives, like Dany will.

Then why some people have mental disorders and others just episodes?

Scientists and mental heath professional are still trying to figure it out.
the most common answer to it is that mental illness is multi factorial.

And that will be the subject of my next entry. Until then, be safe and please talk to anyone you trust if you recognize yourself in Dany or Marianne.

Ale

A birds view

Psychology is basically the study of human behavior.
Most of the scientific knowledge gathered on this domain goes back to only fifty years ago.
Psychology is in fact one of the youngest human science wich is exactly why it is so exsciting to study it; everything is yet to be explained.
On this blog I'll introduce you to the basics of all the main cathegories of the study on human beahvior., wich are:
- developmental psychology
- learning psychology
- neuropsychology, cognitive psychology
-psychometrics
- personality psychology
-psychopathology
-social psychology