Psychology, Unit 4, SAC 2, 2025 Area of Study 2: What influences mental wellbeing?

Mental wellbeing

• Positive state of mind, enjoyment of life, and having ability to cope with stressors of everyday life and develop our potential

• Mentally healthy, feeling good about ourselves and functioning well. Thinking, feeling and behaving in ways that enable us to cope with change and challenges

Functioning

How an individual independently performs in their environment

Levels of funcitoning(IRDECS)

• Interpersonal relationships: ability to interact with and get along with other people

• Recreational/leisure activities: participation in extracurricular activities, hobbies

• Daily living skills: participation in self care, fulfilling house hold responsibilities, management of personal resources, ability to access transportation and travel safely

• Emotions: self regulation of and dealing with emotions, keeping daily hassles, worries and stressors under control

• Cognitive skills: learning and applying knowledge, understanding and communicating, logical and clear thinking, planning, and decision making

• School and work settings: productive and achieving goals

Resilience

• Ability to cope with and manage change, uncertainty and life stressors and restore positive functioning

• Mentally healthy people are commonly described as having high levels of resilience while mentally unwell people are described as having low levels of resilience

Characteristics of resilience

• Strong belief in their abilities to accomplish tasks and succeed

• High self esteem

• Approaching adversity and stress with optimism

• Being adaptable and flexible

• Being organised

• Having problem solving skills

• Ability to make and carryout realistic plans

Social and emotional wellbeing(SEWB)

• Used by Aborginal and Torres Strait Islander people to describe the physical, social, emotional, spiritual and cultural wellbeing of a person

• Based on a hollistic, multidimensional view of health that recognises their connection to country, culture, spirituality, ancestry, family, and community, which impacts their wellbeing

Connection to body and behaviours and it’s restoration

Involves all aspects of physical health and wellbeing, especially feeling a strong and positive connection to ones body and appreciating everything it allows us to do and experience in life

Restoration: includes sports, hunting and gathering, traditional diets and medicines and accessing services

Connection to mind and emotions and it’s restoration

Emphasises the individuals personal experiences of their mental wellbeing and their ability to manage thoughts and feelings

Includes recognising culture bound disorders and the importance of positive emotions, self confidence and experiencing joy.

Restoration: includes accessing supports, education, truth telling and recognition of human rights

Connection to family and kinship and it’s restoration

Recognises that family and kinship systems have been central to the functioning of traditional and contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s lives

Maintain interconnectedness through cultural ties and caring relationships and provides strong sense of belonging

Restoration:connecting with family history, strong parenting and family programs, spending time with Elders and developing healthy relationships with signif others

Connection to community and it’s restoration

Emphasises a connection to a communal space that provides opportunities for individuals and families to connect with each other and work together

Restoration: self determination, community control, utilising community to be engaged with others and as a place to give and seek support from others

Connection to country and it’s restoration

Recognises that relationship with Country underpins all other forms of relational wellbeing

Being on and caring for country has positive physical and mental health outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people

Restoration: returning to land as a way of healing body, mind, spirit, reconnecting with Country, and cultural renewal

Connection to culture and it’s restoration

Refers to ones secure sense of cultural identity and values through connection to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people

Includes all knowledge systems, ways of knowing and traditions/practices

Provides a sense of continuity with the past and helps underpin a strong identity

Restoration: learning about, involvement and participation in cultural expression and knowledge

Connection to spirit, spirituality and ancestors and it’s restoration

Recognises the sacred and inter-connective relationship between Country, human and non human beings and past, present, future

Includes knowledge and belief systems and Dreaming

Worldviews are grounded in spirituality and connection to ancestors

Restoration: accepting evolving expressions of indigeneity and expressions of spirituality coexisting with other religions or mindful practices that enable peace and balance

Continuum of mental health

Mental health can range from mentally well, through to a mental health problem, through to mentally unwell

Mentally healthy

Generally positive state of mental wellbeing, having the ability to cope with and manage life’s challenges, working productively, striving to achieve one’s goals and potential, and having a sense of connection to others and the community in general

Mental health problem

Adversely affects the way a person thinks, feels and/or behaves, but typically to a lesser extent and of a shorter duration than a disorder

Mental health disorder and its characteristics

Mental health state that involves a combination of thoughts, feelings, and/or behaviours, which are typically associated with significant personal distress and impair the ability to function effectively in everyday life

• Results from dysfunction within the individual

• Clinically diagnosable dysfunction in thoughts, feelings and behaviours

• Causes significant distress or disability in functioning in everyday life

• Actions and reactions are atypical

Internal factors

• Influences that originate inside or within a person

• Can be biological or psychological

Biological factors

Physiologically based or determined influences such as:

• Genes we inherit

• Balances or imbalances in specific neurotransmitters

• Substance abuse

• Physiological response to medication

• Brain and nervous system funcitoning

• Hormonal activities

• Fight-flight- freeze and other bodily responses to stress

Psychological factors

Involve all those influences associated with mental processes such as:

• Our thoughts, ways of thinking, beliefs, attitudes

• Our skills in interacting with others

• Prior learning, perceptions of ourselves, others and our external environment

• How we learn, make decisions, solve problems, understand and experience emotions, respond to and manage stress, and reconstruct memories.

External factors

Are factors that originate outside a person.

Stress

A state of physiological and psychological arousal produced by internal or external stressors that are perceived by the individual as challenging or exceeding their ability or resources to cope.

Anxiety

• A state of physiological arousal associated with feelings of apprehension, worry or uneasiness that something is wrong or something unpleasant is about to happen.

• Adaptive response

• Involved in fight or flight response

• Can reduce our ability to:

  •Concentrate

  •Learn

  •Think clearly

  •Make accurate judgements

  •Perform motor tasks

Severe anxiety physiological responses

-Shortness of breath

-Sweating

-Trembling

-Nausea

-Cramps

-Dizziness

-Feelings of suffocating

-Feelings of losing control/impending doom

Phobia

Characterised by excessive or unreasonable fear of a particular object or situation, often leading to avoidance behaviour.

Phobic stress response

When someone has a specific phobia, exposure to a phobic stimulus typically triggers an acute stress response involving physiological changes like those of the fight–flight–freeze response.

In some cases, the person’s reaction is so intense that it takes the form of a panic attack.

Panic attack and it’s physiological/psychological changes

A period of sudden onset of
intense fear or terror, often associated with feelings of impending doom.

•Shortness of breath

•Sweating

•Trembling

•Tightness in chest

•Nausea

•Feeling dizzy/faint

•Feelings of going crazy, losing control or dying

Gamma-amino-butryic acid (GABA)

• Inhibitory neurotransmitter

• Makes postsynaptic neurons less likely to to be activated

• One of its roles is to fine- tune neurotransmission in the brain and maintain neurotransmission and associated neuronal activity at an optimal level.

• Acts like a calming agent to the excitatory neurotransmitters that lead to anxiety.

Biological factors factors contributing to the development of specific phobias

GABA dysfunction and long term potentiation

GABA dysfunction

• The inability of a person’s brain to regulate/produce/release/recieve sufficient levels of GABA, resulting in a reduced ability to regulate brain function.

• Makes them more vulnerable to anxiety as their fight–flight response is more easily activated.

• This increases their likelihood of developing phobias.

Long term potentiation

Believed to play an important role in the learning and memory of fear by strengthening synaptic connections in the neural pathway formed during the learning process, resulting in enhanced or more effective synaptic transmission within that pathway.

Psychological contributing factors to the development of specific phobia

Behavioural and cognitive model

Behavioural model

•Phobias are learned through experience and may be acquired, maintained or modified by environmental consequences such as rewards and punishments.

•A specific phobia may be precipitated through classical conditioning and perpetuated by operant conditioning.

•This two-part process was originally called two-factor learning theory.

Precipitation by classical conditioning

•The development of a specific phobia when a stimulus with no particular significance (i.e. a neutral or unconditioned stimulus) becomes, by association, a sign of impending threat, danger or some other unpleasant event (i.e. a conditioned stimulus).

•The innate, naturally occurring fear response (UCR) eventually becomes a conditioned fear response (CR). In addition, stimulus generalisation may occur to other similar objects or situations.

Perpetuation by operant conditioning

•After acquisition through classical conditioning, the phobia can be maintained and therefore perpetuated through operant conditioning.

•Any avoidance response to any phobic stimulus will continue to be reinforced through operant conditioning

Cognitive models

Focus on how the individual processes information about the phobic stimulus and related events.

According to these models, people can actually create their own problems (and symptoms) by the way they interpret objects or situations.

Cognitive bias

A tendency to think in a way that involves errors of judgment and faulty decision-making.

Includes memory bias and catastrophic thinking

Memory bias

• Refers to the distorting influences
  of present knowledge, beliefs and feelings on the recollection of previous experiences.

• Includes consistency bias and change bias

Consistency bias

Memories of past experiences are distorted through reconstruction to fit in with what is presently known or believed

Change bias

Whenever we recall a past experience we exaggerate the difference between what we knew or felt then and what we currently know or feel, which can lead our phobic fears to grow over time, disproportionately from what they are in reality.

Catastrophic thinking

A thinking style which involves overestimating, exaggerating or magnifying an object or situation and predicting the worst possible outcome.

Social factors contributing to the development of a specific phobia

Environmental triggers and stigma

Environmental triggers

These ‘specific’ objects or situations in the ‘environment’ ‘triggered’, an extreme fear response at the time

Often, an initial fear response to a specific environmental trigger becomes a conditioned fear response through classical conditioning processes and is produced whenever the stimulus (or a generalised version) is subsequently encountered.

Stigma

Because the fear associated with specific phobias is typically limited to the phobic stimuli and many people with a phobia seem to function ‘normally’ outside of the phobic situation, it is common to believe that specific phobias are ‘less severe’ than other anxiety disorders and may not even be a real ‘disorder’ at all.

Biological interventions and their use for specific phobias

Benzodiazepines and breathing retraining

Benzodiazepine agents

• GABA agonists

• A group of drugs that work on the central nervous system, acting selectively on GABA receptors in the brain to increase GABA’s inhibitory effects and make post-synaptic neurons resistant to excitation

• Slow down CNS activity

• Anti-anxiety and sedative effects

Benzodiazepine process

• When a benzodiazepine attaches to a GABA receptor, it changes the shape of the receptor to make it more receptive to the activity of GABA and consequently more resistant to excitation. Reducing the excitability of neurons reduces the communication between neurons and, therefore, has a calming effect on many of the functions of the brain.

• Bind to matching shaped GABA receptors and then stimulate the inhibitory action of GABA in the post synaptic neuron.

• Has inhibitory effects, imitates GABA’s inhibitory effects

Short-acting benzodiazepine length of time

Remains in the bloodstream and is cleared from the body in a short period of time

They are effective almost immediately and broken down by your body within a few hours (duration of action is usually 3-8 hrs)

Positive and negative side effects of benzodiazepine

Pos: Highly effective

Neg: Can be addictive, can lower inhibitions, reduce alertness

Breathing retraining

An anxiety-management technique that involves teaching correct breathing habits or correct abnormal breathing patterns when anticipating or exposed to a phobic stimulus, so it may also help to reduce anxiety or alleviate some of its symptoms

Also inhibits a fight or flight reaction and returning to a normal state after it has been activated as a slow respiration rate and fight-flight can’t occur at the same time

Psychological interventions and their use for specific phobias

CBT and systemic desensitisation

Cognitive behavioural therapy(CBT)

Changes thoughts and behaviours that perpetuate the phobia and improve coping skills.

The individual will identify their fear- and anxiety-related thoughts as these are likely to reflect cognitive biases that strongly affect whether they experience fear or anxiety and how they behave when exposed to a phobic stimulus

However, once the individual can recognise unhelpful ways of thinking, they will be better able to make changes to replace these with new ways of thinking that reduce fear and anxiety.

Systematic desensitisation

A kind of behaviour therapy that aims to replace an anxiety response with a relaxation response when an individual with a specific phobia encounters a fear stimulus.

Applies classical conditioning principles in a process that involves unlearning the connection between anxiety and a specific object or situation and reassociating feelings of relaxation and safety with that particular object or situation.

Stages of systematic desensitisation

1. Teaching the individual a relaxation technique that they can use to decrease the physiological symptoms of anxiety when confronted by a phobic stimulus.

2. breaking down the anxiety-arousing object or situation into a sequence arranged from least to most anxiety-producing. This is called a fear hierarchy.

3. Involves the systematic, graduated pairing of items in the hierarchy with relaxation by working upwards through items in the hierarchy, one ‘step’ at a time.

Social interventions and their use for specific phobias

Psychoeducation

Psychoeducation

Involves the provision and explanation of information about a mental disorder to individuals diagnosed with the disorder to increase knowledge and understanding of their disorder and its treatment.

Challenges unrealistic or anxious thoughts

Doesn’t encourage avoidance behaviours

Protective factors

Something that enhances and helps to protect mental wellbeing and reduces the likelihood that mental illness will occur.

Strengthens a persons mental wellbeing and work to improve their ability to cope with difficult circumstances.

Biological protective factors

• Adequate nutritional intake and hydration

• Adequate sleep

Adequate nutritional intake and hydration

Reduces the risk of physical health problems such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes and helps with sleep, energy levels, mood and mental health

Adequate sleep

About waking up feeling rested, refreshed and ready for the day and feeling positive about ourselves and our abilities, rather than getting a certain number of hours

During sleep, the body undergoes repair and replenishes resources depleted during the major wake period and triggers the release of growth hormones and hormones that affect other functions. It gives our brain ‘down time’ to process information and consolidate new pathways to help us remember what we learnt when awake and ensure the relevant knowledge and skills are available when needed

Psychological protective factors

• Cognitive behavioural strategies

• Mindfulness meditation

Cognitive behavioural strategies

Techniques to identify, assess and correct faulty patterns of thinking or problem behaviours that may be affecting mental health and wellbeing

1. Consider the evidence

2. Is there an alternative explanation?

3. What would you say to a friend who is thinking like that?

4. What is the likelihood?

5. Is there a more helpful way to think about this?

Behaviour activation

Involves identifying and scheduling activities that promote enjoyment or reduce stress.

The focus is on helping people develop specific goals and achievable plans that encourage them to regularly engage in mood elevating, positively reinforcing activities that enhance mental wellbeing.

Mindfullness meditation

Involves a person focusing attention on their breathing, whilst thoughts, feelings and sensations are experienced freely as they arise.

Teaches people to slow down their racing thoughts, let go of negativity and calm both their mind and body. Helps people avoid being distracted by negative unhelpful thinking by learning to observe their thoughts, emotions and other present in the moment experiences.

Social protective factors

Support from family, friends and community that is authentic and energising

Includes:

• Appraisal support

• Tangible assistance

• Informational support

• Emotional support

Appraisal support

Help from another person that improves someone’s understanding of their mental health problem and the resources and coping strategies that may be needed to deal with it

Tangible assistance

Involves providing material support, such as services, financial assistance or goods, that may help offset the effects of a mental health problem.

Informational support

Providing information about how to cope with a mental health problem, symptoms or contributory factors.

Emotional support

Family, friends and the community can also provide emotional support; for example, through expressions of empathy and by reassurance that a person is cared for, valued and will be helped in any way required.

Cultural determinants

Protective factors that help maintain strong connections to culture, strengthen cultural identity, enhance resilience and contribute to the maintenance of good mental wellbeing

Includes cultural continuity and self determination

Cultural continuity

• The preservation of all things to do with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ culture over time, and the sense of history, identity and belonging this provides

• Ensures maintenance of cultural connection, which is integral to ABTSI social and emotional wellbeing (SEWB).

Self determination

• The right to freely determine/control their political status and freely pursue their cultural, social and economic development

• Means that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are authorized and empowered to take ownership and responsibility for designing, delivering and evaluating policy on their own terms to result in better mental wellbeing outcomes.

Pros and cons of qualitative research

Pro- in depth understanding

Con- prone to subjectivity and bias

Pros and cons of quantitative research

Pro- straightforward to analyse and is objective

Con- lacks depth and context