Led by Albert Ellis Simulacrum
About this course
One of the seven topics of OCR GCSE Psychology, taken in Component 01. This module studies significant mental health problems — what they are, how they are explained, and how they are treated — through two conditions the specification names: schizophrenia and clinical depression.
Your host is the Albert Ellis Simulacrum, founder of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy, whose ABC model of depression is one of the explanations the spec requires. His whole body of work holds that beliefs, not events, produce distress — so he embodies the psychological side while presenting the biological side fairly.
This is clinical, factual material about conditions, taught at one remove. It is about explanation and evidence, not personal diagnosis.
Led by Albert Ellis Simulacrum
The question
What are significant mental health problems, and how are they explained? You will study how mental health is defined and measured, how classification and attitudes have changed since 1959, and the effects of stigma and discrimination. Then, for both schizophrenia and clinical depression, you will study their ICD characteristics and statistics and a biological explanation (the dopamine hypothesis; the social rank theory) beside a psychological one (the social drift theory; the ABC model), telling the story of the Daniel et al. (1991) and Tandoc et al. (2015) studies.
Outcome
You can describe both conditions as set out in the ICD, explain a biological and a psychological theory for each, and tell the story of both core studies with the correct debate attached.
Sub-units
Led by Albert Ellis Simulacrum
The question
What treatment follows from which explanation? You will study how anti-psychotics and anti-depressants work on the brain (the biological treatment), how psychotherapy works including the cognitive disputing of irrational beliefs (the psychological treatment), and the role of neuropsychology and brain imaging in studying these conditions. You will learn why a biological explanation points to a biological treatment and a psychological one to psychotherapy — and why many clinicians now combine them.
Outcome
You can explain the drug and psychotherapy treatments for these conditions, relate each to its underlying explanation, and argue with reasons for combining them.
Sub-units