© Borgis - Postępy Nauk Medycznych 1/2013, s. 22-27
*Stanisław Malicki1, Joanna Dudek-Głąbicka2, Paweł Ostaszewski2, 3
Funkcjonalno-kontekstualne rozumienie problemów zdrowotnych
Towards functional-contextualistic understanding of health problems
1Innlandet Hospital Trust, Norway
Head of Department: Tom Eidlaug, MD
2Department of Psychology, University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warszawa, Poland
Head of Department: Ewa Trzebińska, PhD
3Department of Psychology, University of Warsaw, Poland
Head of Department: Ewa Czerniawska, PhD
Streszczenie
Artykuł poświęcony jest roli lekarza pierwszego kontaktu oraz pediatry w zapobieganiu i leczeniu problemów psychicznych i zaburzeń rozwojowych u dzieci. Autorzy zwracają szczególną uwagę na znaczenie komunikacji między lekarzami i rodzicami pacjenta. Sposób podejścia do zgłaszanego problemu reprezentowany przez lekarza może mieć znaczny wpływ na dziecko, jego rodziców i opiekunów, przyczyniając się do powodzenia lub niepowodzenia leczenia. Obecnie, najbardziej popularnym podejściem do problemów psychiatrycznych i psychologicznych jest model biomedyczny. Tak widzą te problemy zarówno lekarze, jak i pacjenci, ich opiekunowie oraz rodzice. Zawdzięczamy to współczesnej medycynie, która utrzymuje, że problemy psychologiczne i choroby somatyczne mają taką samą naturę. Zdrowie somatyczne to, według tego podejścia, brak choroby. Analogicznie, zdrowie psychiczne to brak niewłaściwych (będących przyczyną choroby) procesów. Takie podejście do zdrowia psychicznego może prowadzić do stygmatyzacji, odrzucenia czy dewaluacji i etykietowania pacjenta. Celem artykułu jest przedstawienie funkcjonalno-kontekstualnego podejścia do zdrowia psychicznego jako alternatywy dla modelu biomedycznego. Podejście funkcjonalno-kontekstualnego umieszcza problemy psychologiczne w kontekście indywidualnej historii życia i aktualnej sytuacji życiowej pacjenta. „Symptomy” widziane są jako rozwinięte na przestrzeni życia zachowania stanowiące – najwyraźniej nieudaną – próbę radzenia sobie z problemami życiowymi. Artykuł przedstawia podstawy funkcjonalnego kontekstualizmu i jego implikacje dla zrozumienia problemów psychicznych. Artykuł kończą wskazówki praktyczne dotyczące zastosowania funkcjonalno-kontekstualne rozumienia zdrowia do relacji między klinicystami i rodzicami.
Summary
The article focuses on the role of general practitioners and pediatricians in prevention and treatment of children’s mental health problems. The authors emphasize the role of communication between clinicians and parents of child patients. Practitioners’ attitude to and understanding of the nature of treated problems is thought to have a significant impact on children, their parents and other caregivers, and can be crucial for treatment outcomes. Nowadays, the most popular understanding of psychiatric and psychological disorders, which is shared by care providers, patients and their families, is the biomedical model. Modern medicine delivers the message that psychological problems are similar to medical illnesses. Physical health is seen as the absence of disease and, similarly, mental health is seen as the absence of abnormal processes. Current approach to mental health may result in stigma, rejection, devaluation and labeling of patients. The purpose of this article is to introduce an alternative, functional-contextualistic approach to mental health, which situates psychological problems within the context of personal history and current life circumstances of an individual. Presented symptoms are seen as behaviors which have developed in the course of life as an apparently unsuccessful way of coping with life problems. The paper presents fundamentals of functional-contextualism and contains a discussion of their implications for understanding of health problems. The article concludes with advice regarding practical applications of functional-contextualistic philosophy of health to the relationship between clinicians and parents.
INTRODUCTION
The role of general practitioners (GP) and pediatricians in prevention and treatment of children’s mental health problems is crucial. The GP is most frequently the first choice for parents when their child is having a physical or a psychological problem (1). In Poland, where access to psychological care and psychotherapy is limited due to financial restraints, pediatricians have to provide for the psychological needs of patients and their families (2). The effectiveness of treatment relies – among others – on the quality of communication with parents. Pediatricians can model how the child’s problem is seen and treated by the parents (3) and thus have a major impact on children’s and their families’ health and well-being.
Nowadays, the most popular understanding of psychiatric and psychological disorders, which is shared by care providers, patients and their families, is the biomedical model. Modern medicine delivers the message that psychological problems are similar to medical illnesses. Physical health is seen as the absence of disease. Similarly, mental health is seen as the absence of abnormal processes, processed that are caused by assumed bioneurochemical abnormalities. This view leads to syndromal thinking, which means looking for signs and symptoms that should be changed, fixed or treated with medications (4). As a consequence of such thinking, the number of people convinced that drugs should be taken to treat mental health problems is growing (5). Parents often expect that they will get a ready-made solution, or a “magic pill”, for their children’s psychological or developmental problems (1, 6).
Current approach to mental health may result in stigma, rejection, devaluation and labeling (7-10). Furthermore, the medical model implies that “disability is ‘located’ within individual children’s bodies” (11). The patient becomes an ”object” for the treatment, which results in patient passivity. Treatment focused on symptom reduction “downplays functional and positive markers of psychological health” (4). Moreover, impact of such treatments on life quality and social functioning is often questionable (4, 10).
The purpose of this article is to introduce an alternative approach to psychological disorders and to show its implications for practitioners, whose attitude to and understanding of the nature of the treated problems can have significant impact on children, parents and other caregivers. As the authors of the article believe, general practitioners and pediatricians can initiate a major shift in attitude to mental health problems within the public health care system, a shift which may create space for new approaches and better treatment outcomes.
The article presents fundamentals of functional-contextualism and their implications for understanding of health problems. The authors propose practical applications of functional-contextualistic philosophy of health to the relationship between clinicians and parents of child patients. The paper concludes with practical advice to practitioners based on three major aspects of functional-contextualistic approach to health: (a) the role of environmental context in psychopathology and treatment outcomes, with the focus on parental experiential avoidance; (b) functional-contextualistic understanding of disability and impairment; (c) functional-contextualistic understanding of treatment goals.
FUNCTIONAL – CONTEXTUALISTIC APPROACH TO HEALTH
During the last two decades a series of new therapies emerged in the area of psychosocial interventions, and gradually started to gain empirical support and worldwide attention. Although the new approaches differ significantly from each other in many theoretical and practical aspects, interventions such as functional analytic psychotherapy (12), dialectical behavior therapy (13), integrative behavioral couples therapy (14), acceptance and commitment therapy (4) and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (15) share certain distinctive features that set them apart from other treatments. On the basis of their similarities, the new treatments are collectively called the third wave or the new wave therapies. This means that they might be seen as a second (after the cognitive revolution of the 1960s) major shift within the cognitive-behavioral tradition (16).
The rise of the new therapies originates, among others, from research results showing that many treatments (both pharmacological and psychotherapeutic) designed for highly specified syndromes have much broader effects, and that pathological processes tend to be similarly broad in their prevalence and impact. This proved the need for more general models and a more transdiagnostic approach to psychopathology and created the stage on which the new treatments began to emerge. Their strategies – that balance direct change with acceptance and didactics with experiential learning – did not fit into post-rationalism and constructivism, which form philosophical framework underlying CBT. Thus, functional contextualism was proposed as the explicit or implicit philosophical foundation for the third wave therapies (16).
Functional contextualism* is a modern philosophy of science with its roots in pragmatism. The core unit of analysis in contextualism is the “ongoing act in context” (17). Contextualism focuses on any analyzed event as a whole that cannot be better understood by breaking it into pieces. For example, an organism always interacts with the environment as a whole organism and not as a sum of its parts, like brain, muscles, senses, emotions, thoughts etc. Any of those parts can be analyzed separately, as a “smaller whole”, and can become the subject of interest. However, the results of such analyses cannot be simply summed up in order to understand and explain the way in which the whole organism reacts. By that, contextualism rejects any form of reductionism, such as for example biological reductionism that attempts to understand and explain behavior by analyzing bio-chemical processes in organisms. The core unit of analysis in contextualism is a whole. The parts can be derived from the whole, but the whole cannot be derived from the parts. This principle applies to any psychological event and any behavior. It is the whole organism that responds to its environment, while thoughts, emotions or physical reactions are just different modalities of that response. According to this principle, any behavior can be meaningfully analyzed only together with its antecedent and its consequence that establish the function of behavior.
According to another important principle of contextualism, behavior can only be understood in the context in which it occurs. By “context” we mean both actual, i.e. situational context, and historical context that includes learning history. Behavior viewed in isolation from its contexts loses its meaning. Thus, any analysis of a problematic behavior should include analysis of contexts in which the behavior occurs. Only in that way problematic behaviors can be fully understood, their functions identified and solution to problems found.
Contextualists oppose meaningless comparing of a patient’s behaviors (called symptoms) separated from their contexts with likewise separated behaviors of other people. Such “classifications” of behaviors or matching them to “criteria” bring no understanding of the nature of presented problems and thus cannot lead to solutions. Stated in a different way, contextual variables are seen as an integral part of the clinical problem and should be treated as the problem itself.
Clinical implications of contextualistic philosophy were appealingly reviewed by Perez Alvarez (18). They can be summed up and commented upon in the following major points:
1) Psychological disorders should be seen in the context of personal circumstances (both historical and present) and not as an internal biological or psychological malfunction. In other words, problems are not caused by “failure” within a patient but by “failure” within circumstances.
2) “Symptoms” are not emanations of underlying causes, but would be seen as (often dramatic) actions that develop in the course of life. Symptoms, like all behaviors, result from the patient’s learning history and have been shaped by circumstances.
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Piśmiennictwo
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