Social drift theory

1. Social drift theory is the psychological explanation of schizophrenia.
2. Schizophrenia is diagnosed more often among people on low incomes and in inner-city areas.
3. The theory claims the condition comes first, and that the way society then treats a person drives them down the social scale.
4. It works through two mechanisms: rejection by society and disengagement of the individual.

Rejection by society

1. Diagnosis usually arrives in the late teens or twenties, before qualifications, a career or a mortgage are in place.
2. The diagnosis then works as a label, and stigma turns into discrimination.
3. Employers do not hire, or do not keep on, someone whose diagnosis they know about, so paid work becomes hard to hold.
4. The symptoms add to that, because interviews, fixed shifts and busy workplaces are genuinely harder with hallucinations or avolition.
5. No work means no income, so the rent stops being affordable and cheaper housing is the only option.
6. Landlords may also refuse a tenancy, and friends and even family sometimes pull away, which strips out the support that was left.

Disengagement of the individual

1. Disengagement means withdrawing from society to avoid being rejected again.
2. After repeated refusals a person expects the next one, so they stop applying for jobs and stop asking to join in.
3. Appointments get missed and medication stops, which makes a relapse more likely.
4. Withdrawal removes the remaining contacts, and isolation makes the symptoms harder to manage, so functioning drops again.
5. Each turn of that cycle lowers social class further, which is the drift the theory is named after.
6. The end point is that people diagnosed with schizophrenia are over-represented in low-income statistics even though the diagnosis came first.
7. Drift stops when the chain is broken by a job kept open, secure housing or steady support.
8. Anti-stigma campaigns and supported employment schemes are designed to interrupt that chain.

Social causation

1. Social causation, argued by Cooper (2005), says low social class helps to cause schizophrenia.
2. On that account it is the stress of poor housing, insecure work, crowded areas and discrimination that raises the risk.
3. The two theories predict the same correlation between low income and diagnosis, which is why the correlation alone settles nothing.
4. One test compares a person's own social class after diagnosis with the class of the family they were born into.
   1. Goldberg and Morrison (1963) found the fathers of men admitted with schizophrenia were spread normally across the social classes while the men themselves were bunched at the bottom, which fits drift.

Evaluating social drift theory

1. In its favour, it explains the class pattern without blaming poor communities for causing illness.
2. It matches what people diagnosed with schizophrenia report about losing work, housing and friends.
3. It fits the evidence on stigma and discrimination.
4. It points to something that can be changed, since supported employment and secure housing interrupt the drift and improve recovery.
5. The main criticism of social drift is problems establishing cause and effect.
6. The evidence is correlational, so it shows low class and diagnosis occurring together without showing which came first.
7. An experiment is not possible here, because nobody can randomly assign a person a social class or a diagnosis.
8. Social drift explains what happens to a person after diagnosis, but leaves the cause of schizophrenia unexplained.
9. It also plays down biology, so it has nothing to say about an overactive dopamine system or a smaller hippocampus.
10. Many people diagnosed with schizophrenia keep their social position, particularly those with strong family and financial support.

Turning this into marks

1. When two mechanisms are asked for, make them genuinely separate: rejection by society is what other people do, and disengagement is what the person then does.
2. Name social drift theory and the direction it claims, because describing poverty and illness side by side does not secure the knowledge mark.
3. The mark most often lost is giving social causation when the question asked about social drift.