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Issues in Mental Health

Humanistic, psychodynamic and cognitive neuroscience explanations of mental illness

  • 3 things to know
  • Component 03

Overview

Recall questions on the humanistic explanation including Rogers's incongruence and conditions of worth, the psychodynamic explanation including personality conflict, defence mechanisms and Freud on depression, and the cognitive neuroscience explanation of hallucinations and depressive bias.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

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Key term

Explain what Rogers meant by incongruence.

Key term

How can conflict between the three parts of the personality produce symptoms?

Key term

What is the central claim of the humanistic explanation?

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

  1. 1

    What is the central claim of the humanistic explanation?

    Model answer

    People have free will and an innate drive towards self-actualisation, and psychological distress arises when that growth is blocked.

  2. 2

    Explain what Rogers meant by incongruence.

    Model answer

    Incongruence is a mismatch between a person's self-concept and their ideal self, and the wider that gap the lower their self-worth and the greater their distress.

  3. 3

    What are conditions of worth?

    Model answer

    They are the requirements a person learns they must meet in order to be accepted, created when others give affection only conditionally, and they lead the person to deny or distort experiences that conflict with the self they feel they must be.

  4. 4

    What does Rogers say a person needs in order to grow?

    Model answer

    Unconditional positive regard, offered alongside empathy and genuineness, so that the person can accept their own experience without feeling threatened by it.

  5. 5

    Why is the humanistic explanation praised as non-stigmatising yet criticised as unscientific?

    Model answer

    It is praised because it is holistic and avoids labelling, treating distress as an understandable response of a whole person; it is criticised because concepts such as self-actualisation are vague and hard to measure, and it offers little for severe disorders such as schizophrenia.

  6. 6

    What does the psychodynamic explanation identify as the cause of mental disorder?

    Model answer

    Unresolved unconscious conflict, usually rooted in early childhood experience, which the person cannot consciously access.

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