The Medical Model

About the lecture

In this lecture, we think about the medical model of mental health, focusing in particular on: (i) Gottesman and colleagues’ 2010 paper investigating the prevalence of mental health problems in children born to psychiatrically ill parents; (ii) Gottesman’s findings, that individuals born to two psychiatrically ill parents had a higher prevalence of mental illness than those born to one, who themselves had a higher prevalence than those born to two parents with no psychiatric illness; (iii) a criticism of Gottesman’s paper being a lack of consideration for the environment within which the children were raised; (iv) the function of twin studies, using monozygotic (identical: 100% shared genes) and dizygotic (non-identical: 50% shared genes) either living in the same or different family environments, to separate genetic factors from environmental ones; (v) the concordance rate discrepancy, indicating inconclusive assessment of the heritability of mental health problems; (vi) the biological view of individual differences explaining mental health problem prevalence, that these differences are rooted in brain structure and neurotransmitter levels/sensitivity.

About the lecturer

Professor Nick Maguire is associate professor in clinical psychology in the Psychology Department at the University of Southampton. Professor Maguire’s research interests are primarily in the mental health issues implicated in homelessness, including substance abuse and personality disorders. Some of Professor Maguire’s recent publications include 'Developing Graduate Employability for a Challenging Labour Market: the validation of the Graduate Capital Scale' (2021) and 'Individualised placement and support programme for people unemployed because of chronic pain: a feasibility study and the InSTEP pilot RCT' (2021).