Topic 5: Clinical psychology — Edexcel A-Level Psychology
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Topic 5: Clinical psychology explained
Topic 5: Clinical psychology covers 2 specification points, including Students must show understanding that clinical… and Individual differences and developmental….
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Open a point below for its explanation and revision guidance.
Students must show understanding that clinical psychology is about explaining and treating mental health issues, and of the different ways of treating them, including counselling and drug treatments.
This topic asks you to hold explanation and treatment together, for schizophrenia and for one further disorder from depression, anorexia nervosa or obsessive compulsive disorder. On the biological side, chlorpromazine reduces dopamine transmission and sedates, while clozapine acts on dopamine and serotonin, is reserved for cases that resist other drugs, and requires regular blood tests because of the risk of agranulocytosis. Leucht and colleagues (2012) pooled trials and found relapse within a year in roughly a quarter of patients kept on antipsychotics against nearly two thirds on placebo. Talking treatment runs from Rogerian counselling, built on empathy, congruence and unconditional positive regard, to cognitive behavioural therapy.
Individual differences and developmental psychology must be considered when learning about links between personality factors and mental disorders and genetic influences (nature) or environmental influences (nurture) within different explanations for mental health disorders.
Two approaches are being pulled into clinical work here. From individual differences comes the question of whether stable traits raise risk, with high neuroticism repeatedly predicting later depression and perfectionism and low self esteem featuring in accounts of anorexia nervosa. From developmental psychology comes the question of what early experience does, with Varese and colleagues (2012) pooling studies to find childhood adversity associated with roughly a threefold rise in psychosis risk. Twin work by Gottesman and Shields gave concordance for schizophrenia far higher in identical than in non-identical pairs but well short of complete, and Tienari and colleagues (2004) found adopted children of mothers with schizophrenia developed it mainly in disturbed adoptive families.
Your focus
- Students must show understanding that clinical psychology is about explaining and treating mental health issues, and of the different ways of treating them, including counselling and drug treatments.
- Individual differences and developmental psychology must be considered when learning about links between personality factors and mental disorders and genetic influences (nature) or environmental influences (nurture) within different explanations for mental health disorders.
Topic 5: Clinical psychology exam tips
Examiner Tips
- 💡Questions often pair one biological and one psychological treatment and ask you to compare, so keep a shared framework of effectiveness, side effects, appropriateness and ethics.
- 💡Paper 2 rewards applying treatment knowledge to a described patient, so practise picking the treatment that fits the symptoms and the setting in the stem.
- 💡When the command word is evaluate, do not describe the therapy for half the answer; two sentences of description is enough before the evidence begins.
- 💡Pearson asks you to bring earlier topics into clinical psychology, so name the approach explicitly and then show its contribution rather than just alluding to it.
- 💡Diathesis-stress is the safest conclusion for an extended answer, but it only earns credit when supported by a named interaction study.
- 💡Watch for questions that give a case history, where the marks come from linking the described family history and life events to the explanation.
Common Mistakes
- Writing that antipsychotics cure schizophrenia, rather than that they reduce symptoms and lower relapse while they are taken.
- Describing counselling as simply listening and giving advice, when the credit is for the named conditions of the therapeutic relationship or the specific cognitive techniques.
- Evaluating a therapy only through ethics and never through outcome evidence, comparison groups or follow up.
- Confusing a clinical psychologist with a psychiatrist and awarding prescribing powers to the wrong profession.
- Reporting twin concordance as proof that a disorder is genetic, when identical twins share an environment as well as their genes and concordance is always incomplete.
- Describing a personality trait as if it were a diagnosis, or treating a correlation between neuroticism scores and depression as evidence that the trait causes the disorder.
- Treating nature and nurture as rival boxes when the marks are for explaining how a vulnerability and a stressor combine.
- Bolting the individual differences and developmental labels onto the answer without showing what each approach actually contributes to the explanation.