THE BIOPSYCHOSOCIAL MODEL of Psychological/Mental Disorders
There are those days when nothing seems to go right come along now and then and it’s infuriating. But the point is that we can all recognize how events can add up to the point where something small can tip us over the edge. In a similar way, biological, psychological and social factors can add up across a person’s life to lead to times of mental ill-health.
For example it is now well established that schizophrenia has a genetic component. However the condition can be triggered by certain traumatic or stressful life events, such as a pattern of poor and chaotic family relationships in childhood. It is more than one factor that caused the condition.
Depression may be caused by a mixture of life events (such as emotional abuse in childhood or traumas in adulthood such as divorce) and a person’s habitual ways of judging themselves and their experiences. Again, it is not one factor alone that caused the issue.
The biopsychosocial model is great for helping us understand how mental health conditions might develop.
1. Biological (e.g. genetics, brain chemistry and brain damage)
2. Social (e.g. life traumas and stresses, early life experiences and family relationships)
3. Psychological (e.g. how we interpret events as signifying something negative about ourselves)
However, we shouldn’t only think of it as being useful for people who are not mentally well. It applies to us all. We can use its three areas as positive forces to improve our mental health.
Your mental health, mine, your friend’s, your family’s and your colleagues’ is created by an interplay of biological, psychological and social factors. This is important to understand. It means that ‘healthy’ people are not separate from ‘unhealthy’ people. The mind of someone who has a mental health condition is not entirely different to yours. There’s just a different combination of factors that have come together to create a state where the person is mentally unwell. As with the mental health continuum, we all have the potential to be mentally well or unwell. We cannot see people with mental health conditions as different in some fundamental way. This is one excellent way to confront the stigma surrounding mental health issues.
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