Schizophrenia is a psychiatric disorder involving loss of contact with reality and a range of symptoms. Research to support the disruption of families and their influence over schizophrenia comes from Marcus who found that all those in his study who got schizophrenia had parents who were rated high on hostility, overconcern and inconsistency. Furthermore Tienari found that all those in his study who got schizophrenia were from families rated as disturbed. He had used tests and interviews to rate the families but personal opinions are subjective and there could be an element of bias in judgement. Furthermore these characteristics may have been caused through coping with an individual with a disorder rather than causing it.
This explanation is also supported by Brown et al. who examined the progress of schizophrenics discharged from hospital and returned to their families. They defined the families they went back to into two different groups. One being high emotionally expressed with strong signs of concern or hostility towards the patient. The other being low expressed emotion families who did not show strong signs of these characteristics. The findings were; over 58% of the patients returning to high EE families relapsed- their symptom reappeared. Only 10% of those returning to low EE families found their symptoms reappearing.
This evidence certainly suggests that high emotional families can act as a trigger for the symptoms of schizophrenia however it can not explain every case of schizophrenia as the statistics only positively link high emotion families with symptoms of schizophrenia. Furthermore there are methodical weaknesses in the study as the schizophrenic families were only assessed after the patient developed the disorder and so, just like the previous research study on this explanation there is no way of identifying cause and affect. For example those who went home to high expressed emotion families may have had a more serious case of schizophrenia and this was the cause for the symptoms to come back; ultimately the high family emotions could be caused as a result of the more serious case of schizophrenia.
One other psychological explanation for the onset of schizophrenia is the cognitive deficits explanation which argues that some schizophrenics have difficulties in understanding other people’s behaviour and this might explain some of the experiences that those with the disorder have. Furthermore this explanation states that deficits in information processing can leave people vulnerable to many of the behaviours typically seen as symptoms. When these people with such vulnerabilities experience stressful events, these deficits make it harder to cope. This emotional pressure can lead to increased cognitive deficits which, in turn, can lead to further deficits. This like the previous explanation seems to link the stressors involved in the sufferer’s environment and likelihood that the disorder will develop.
However, a major problem with this explanation is that cognitive deficits are usually identified by tests designed to measure cognitive skills and the results these tests find little difference between the diagnosis of schizophrenia and people with bipolar disorder. This means that there must other factors in place to explain the behaviour diagnosed as schizophrenic.
From these explanations of psychological causes there is sufficient evidence that psychological ideas for the onset of schizophrenia can explain to some extent how the disorder can develop through cognitive deficits and disrupted families . However the evidence is limited and it is hard to identify the causes and affect within the disrupted families research as they are done retrospectively. Furthermore the findings of the cognitive deficits explanation are only loosely linked to the onset of schizophrenia. Ultimately, research into biological explanations have evidence to suggest that genetic predisposition is needed before psychological explanations can cause schizophrenia, and so psychological explanations can only explain schizophrenia to a certain extent.
