INTEGRATIVE APPROACHES TO PSYCHOPATHOLOGY: THE BIO-PSYCHO-SOCIAL MODEL DR. GEETANJALI PAREEK|

INTEGRATIVE APPROACHES TO PSYCHOPATHOLOGY: THE BIO-PSYCHO-SOCIAL MODEL

Today’s psychologists contend that all behaviour, whether called normal or disordered, arises from the interaction of nature (genetic and physiological factors) and nurture (past and present experiences). To presume that a person is “mentally ill,” they say, attributes the condition that must be found and cured. Apart from this, there may be a difficulty in the person’s environment, in the person’s current interpretations of events, or in the person’s bad habits and poor social skills. Evidence of such effects comes from links between specific disorders and cultures. Cultures differ in their sources of stress, and they produce different ways of coping. The eating disorders anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa, for example, occur mostly in Western cultures. The importance of cultural factors has also received increasing attention. Although many questions remain, these perspectives have given us a deeper understanding of how biological, psychological, and environmental factors can combine to cause psychological disorders.

Today, many psychologists find it useful to incorporate these factors into a more general framework.

One such approach is Bio-psycho-social Approach a multidisciplinary approach to psychopathology based on the idea that mental illness results from a combination of biological, psychological, environmental, and social factors. The biological component of the bio-psycho-social model refers to the influences on disorder that come from the functioning of the individual‘s body. Particularly important are genetic characteristics that make some people more vulnerable to a disorder than others and the influence of neurotransmitters. The psychological component of the bio-psycho-social model refers to the influences that come from the individual, such as patterns of negative thinking and stress responses. The social component of the bio-psycho-social model refers to the influences on disorder due to social and cultural factors such as socioeconomic status, homelessness, abuse, and discrimination. This approach recognizes that mind and body are inseparable. Negative emotions contribute to physical illness, and physical abnormalities contribute to negative emotions. We are mind embodied.

According to the Diathesis-Stress model also called as Vulnerability-Stress model , psychopathological symptoms and diseases are caused by a combination of biological, psychological, and social factors. In simple terms, this model explains mental illness as a byproduct of inherited vulnerabilities (diatheses) and unbearable life experiences (stress).

According to the model, each of us has some degree of vulnerability (ranging from very low to very high) for developing a psychological disorder, given sufficient stress. The vulnerability, or predisposition, can have a biological basis, such as our genotype, over- or under-activity of a neurotransmitter system in the brain, a hair-trigger autonomic nervous system, or a hormonal factor. It could also be due to a personality factor, such as low self-esteem or extreme pessimism, or to previous environmental factors, such as poverty or a severe trauma or loss earlier in life. Likewise, cultural factors can create vulnerability to certain kinds of disorders (Tinsley- Li & Jenkins, 2007). But vulnerability is only part of the equation. In most instances, a predisposition creates a disorder only when a stressor some recent or current event that requires a person to cope combines with a vulnerability to trigger the disorder (van Praag, 2004). Thus, a person who has a genetic predisposition to depression or who suffered a traumatic loss of a parent early in life may be primed to develop a depressive disorder if faced with the stress of a loss later in life.

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