Chapter 1 (Textbook)

Question 1

How do we conceptualise mental health and illness?

Answer 1

distress, abnormality, and dysfunction

Question 2

WHOs definition of mental health

Answer 2

A state of well-being in which the individual realises his or her won abilities, can cope with normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to his or her community

Question 3

Biomedical Model

Answer 3

• approaches mental health and illness as a binary
• some people have mental disorders and those who don’t are mentally healthy (natural state)
• mental illness is something that disrupts a person’s health
• sees mental disorders as a disease
• biomarkers: a measurable substance in the body that definitively indicates the presence of a disease
• treatments: drugs, ECT

Question 4

psychological-behavioural model

Answer 4

• understands mental disorders as common patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving that have deleterious impacts on an individual (individuals experience a mental disorder rather than having it)
• relies on psychotherapy (treatment based on talking and thinking) like CBT, and using techniques like breathing, exercising, etc.

Question 5

Social Model

Answer 5

• understand mental health as a fundamentally social product by seeing health and illness as ways of describing social relations rather than qualities inherent to any single individual
• power and culture: power might be associated with factors such as class, profession, gender, or race. some individuals have more capability than others to shape culture and what is considered mentally healthy or ill within that culture
• demedicalization: the process of taking something understood as a medical problem and redefining it along other lines

Question 6

biopyschosocial model

Answer 6

• assumes that social conditions, individual experiences, and biological factors combine to create mental disorders
• social in this model would mean the social determinants of health (a reference to the conditions in which people live and work and how many factors influence a persons life)
• mental health troubles are not merely in a persons head but also rooted in their social environment