OCR Psychology A Level Book 2 sample

Linking it together The medical model Topic 2 It is now time to take a critical look at the background spreads and key research you have studied so far. In the exam, you are likely to be asked to make links between what you have studied related to topic 2. You need to be able to: • Link the key research to the background spreads. • Link methodological issues to the key research and background spreads. • Link debates to the background spreads, topic area and to the key research. The culprit—this is what a gene looks like. We have about 20,000 of these located on one of 46 chromosomes (a pair of chromosomes look like an X, shown in the background). Each gene codes for proteins and those proteins make your body work. Sampling bias The sample used in Gottesman et al .’s study was extremely large which means the conclusions can be generalised to the target population of Danish citizens. However, Gottesman et al. only included patients with hospital admissions for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. They did not include patients who were treated for their disorder as an outpatient, or those who had symptoms but were not treated at all or those experiencing a different mental illness. This means that the study only included the most severe cases of mental illness. It could be that this bias meant that the conclusions can’t apply to all cases of mental disorder but that only severe disorders have such a convincing genetic component. Ethnocentrism Gottesman et al .’s study is related to the medical model and both are very rooted in individualist , Western cultures where people seek definitive causes for behaviour within the person. Ideas about a biological and genetic basis for mental illness exclude explanations at a group level. In other cultures, explanations of mental illness may focus on social, cultural and spiritual factors as primary causes of mental illnesses rather than factors that come from within the individual. For example, many non-Western cultures hold the belief that mental illness develops from spirits or religious paradigms . This means that Gottesman’s focus on mental illness being heritable is an ethnocentric view of mental illness, one that would not apply in all cultures round the world. Links with methodological issues Validity The diagnosis of the mental illnesses in Gottesman et al .’s research was based on the ICD classification system, which Gottesman et al . explain is a valid system to use. However, the validity of any individual diagnosis depends on many factors. It is possible that some diagnoses referred to in the study were not valid in the first place because the symptoms of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder have some overlap, and so some diagnoses may have initially been incorrect. Friederike Meyer and Thomas Meyer (2009) found that 45% of patients described as having the symptoms of bipolar disorder were misdiagnosed as having another disorder, particularly a psychotic disorder like schizophrenia. Seeman (1987) notes that many different research methods have been used in collecting evidence for the dopamine hypothesis, including drug studies, post-mortems and brain scans . The fact that the results from these different methods and samples all point in the same direction suggests that this is a valid explanation of schizophrenia. One issue, related to validity, is whether brain abnormality causes schizophrenia or the brain abnormality is a consequence of the disorder. Research suggests that brain abnormality is indeed a cause because the differences found in schizophrenic brains have also been identified in patients who are at high risk of the disorder or those at the very early stages of onset (Karlsgodt et al . 2010). This suggests that the abnormalities come before the disorder and supports brain abnormality as a valid explanation of schizophrenia. Reliability Much of the research about brain abnormality as an explanation for mental illness uses MRI scans , such as Kronmüller et al. ’s (2008) research into the reduced size of depressed patients’ hippocampi , and Irle et al .’s (2010) research into the reduced amygdala and hippocampal volume in social phobics. Evidence about the reliability of MRI scans can be poor. One piece of research by Rajendra Morey et al. (2010) analysed MRI scans of 23 participants twice on one day (one hour apart), and twice approximately a week later (one hour apart again). They found large variations in the reliability of the scans between different brain regions, for example analysis of the scans of smaller brain regions such as the amygdala showed low reliability between scanning sessions (+.60), whereas scans of larger regions such as the thalamus produced a much better correlation of +.90. The scans that were one hour apart were more consistent than the scans a week apart. This demonstrates that reliability of MRI scans as a brain imaging technique can vary significantly and therefore should be treated with some caution. How the key research explains the medical model One of the background concepts for this chapter is ‘The genetic explanation of mental illness’. So the question is, how does Gottesman et al. ’s (2010) study illustrate this? Gottesman et al. ’s study supports the medical model because it supports a biological explanation of mental illness, specifically a genetic link. This was demonstrated because Gottesman et al. found an increased risk of offspring being diagnosed with schizophrenia if one or both parents has schizophrenia. They found the same pattern for bipolar disorder . This risk is significantly greater if both the parents have the disorder than if one parent has the disorder. The research by Gottesman et al. also supported the genetic explanation of mental illness because it demonstrated that there is an increased risk of developing a disorder if parents have any mental disorder. For example, if a parent had either schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, a child was significantly more likely to develop one or the other of those illnesses than if neither parent had either disorder. This suggests that the same genes may underlie some mental disorders. This again supports a genetic explanation of mental illness. Evaluation of research on the medical model Chapter 1: Issues in mental health 30