A Straight Talking Introduction to the Causes of Mental Health Problems (Straight Talking Introduction To...) by John Read & Pete Sanders

Author:John Read & Pete Sanders [Read, John]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781910919019
Publisher: PCCS Books
Published: 2010-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Are the public right? What the research says about the causes of mental health problems

In the previous chapter we looked at the research surveying the views of non-professionals, including patients and family members. We saw survey respondents in different countries consistently identify the social causes of mental health problems, including:

in the UK

•life events, family problems and economic hardship

•social stressors and family conflicts – e.g., being mercilessly persecuted by family and friends

•having come from backgrounds that promote stress

•unusual or traumatic experiences

•social, economic, and family pressures

in Australia

•day-to-day-problems such as stress, family arguments, difficulties at work or financial difficulties

•the recent death of a close friend or relative

•traumatic events

•problems from childhood such as being badly treated or abused, losing one or both parents when young or coming from a broken home

in Ireland

•stressful life events

•childhood problems such as lack of adequate parental love

in Germany

•acute stress in the form of life events

•chronic stress in partnership and family

in the USA

•the way the person was raised

•stressful circumstances

The public seem to recognise two general groups of social causes: past and present. The causes in the past tend to focus, unsurprisingly, on childhood. The causes in the present are ongoing stresses of various sorts. Some specific types of causes, some of which span past and present, childhood and adulthood, are: poverty, trauma/abuse/violence, neglect, loss and general day-to-day stress.

Does research support these widely held public beliefs? The research summarised next focuses largely, but not only, on the more extreme mental health problems like psychosis and ‘schizophrenia’. This is mainly because if we can demonstrate that something as supposedly biological as ‘schizophrenia’ is actually largely caused by social factors, then it should not be surprising that things like depression and anxiety are also primarily caused by things that happen in our lives. We shall pay more attention to depression in Chapter 8.

It should be stressed from the outset that it is usually a combination of the factors discussed here, rather than any one of them in isolation, that tend to tip people into extremely distressing experiences likely to be diagnosed as ‘psychosis’. Poverty by itself, for example rarely causes mental health problems, but in combination with childhood neglect for example (the chances of which are greater if you grow up in a poor family), your chances of becoming extremely depressed are relatively high compared to someone who grew up in a safe, nurturing, relatively well-off family. Furthermore, the richer you are, the more resources, professional or otherwise, you have at your disposal to help you through emotionally difficult times – an old joke says rich people holiday in the Bahamas while the rest of us take our ‘breaks’ in the loony bin.

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