Journal
COGNITIVE SCIENCE
Volume 33, Issue 2, Pages 147-182Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/j.1551-6709.2009.01008.x
Keywords
Concept; Clinical reasoning; Causal explanation; Dualism
Categories
Funding
- NIMH NIH HHS [R01 MH057737-11, R01 MH057737, F32 MH069013] Funding Source: Medline
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The current experiments examine mental health clinicians' beliefs about biological, psychological, and environmental bases of the DSM-IV-TR mental disorders and the consequences of those causal beliefs for judging treatment effectiveness. Study 1 found a large negative correlation between clinicians' beliefs about biological bases and environmental/psychological bases, suggesting that clinicians conceptualize mental disorders along a single continuum spanning from highly biological disorders (e.g., autistic disorder) to highly nonbiological disorders (e.g., adjustment disorders). Study 2 replicated this finding by having clinicians list what they thought were the specific causes of nine familiar mental disorders and rate their bio-psycho-environmental bases. Study 3 further found that clinicians believe medication to be more effective for biologically based mental disorders and psychotherapy to be more effective for psychosocially based mental disorders. These results demonstrate that even expert mental health clinicians make strong distinctions between psychological and biological phenomena.
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