Many doctors and therapists face a difficult challenge in trying to prescribe the same treatment to multiple different individuals for one particular problem. The reason for this, in part, is of course that different individuals are just that: different! To help explain the mix of factors that go into whether or not someone is susceptible to a particular disorder or disease, the field of behavioral science has borrowed from the medical field an idea that says everything we become is, of course, a mix between genetic and environmental factors. To help illustrate this, we have the diathesis-stress model, which I decided to make a video about below. While a great deal of research has been done on this topic, it is important to know that in this particular video I choose only to cover the basic idea to get you started in further examining your own core foundations in terms of both strengths and vulnerabilities.

Video Transcript:

How do we determine how much stress will cause a problem or at what point someone enters into a mental disorder? And, how do we determine how susceptible someone is to mental illness or even just mental deficiency? What creates a problem in someone’s life where they begin to have difficulty functioning in the real world?

One of the things that we have to demonstrate this is something called the diathesis-stress model. This is something that behavioral science sort of derived in one sense from the medical field. So, here I have an ordinary glass and I have a bottle of water. Now this is something that all of my instructors in my psychology classes have always used to demonstrate the diathesis-stress model because it’s a very good little visualization.

So, let’s imagine… that this glass here represents your susceptibility to schizophrenia, for example. And let’s say that right now, the glass is empty, so this would be no susceptibility. Let’s say that you [then] have genetics that fill up the glass just a little bit and that makes you just a little bit more susceptible. Now let’s say you have a ridiculously stressful environment and you can’t really cope with the stress…

Well, maybe if your susceptibility is low enough you still won’t get schizophrenia but we can imagine what would happen if the problem keeps going, alright? Maybe your genetic susceptibility is a little higher, maybe the stress is a little higher. At some point, the glass will overflow and that is when you get schizophrenia.

The same thing could be looked at for all kinds of maladaptive traits and everyone is different so another example might be: if someone comes to me, they’re overweight, and they say “I really want to lose 50 pounds, what’s the fastest way to do that?” Well a few of the answers I would give them right away is I would say: there’s two things.

1) You should probably go with a low-carb diet because that is what has been scientifically proven to allow people to lose weight faster than any other diet plan and,

2) You should combine that with high intensity, short burst interval training. So you should do small 12 to 15 minute workouts where you’re kind of giving it your all… you arrange it by jump starting your heart, allowing it to slow down, and then doing that again. And you do that several times per workout session. That’s the form of cardiovascular exercise that you would do to do this.

Well, it’s really simple to tell someone this advice and even to get them to believe it but in order to get someone to engage in the kind of self control and initiative that it takes for them to actually pursue that goal it’s a whole other matter entirely. In order to get someone to change their diet, you’re having to tell someone to gain control over very complex chemical processes in the brain whenever it comes to self control.

And there’s a lot of different studies that have been done on self control which say that, in fact, in certain cases, if you don’t have a developed pathology for having a certain kind of resolve, you actually have limited self control.

You might think to yourself after watching this video: what are your susceptibilities and what are your weaknesses? What are the things that you can work on? What did your family have problems with? What did your parents and your grandparents and the parents before that have problems with?

Do research on your family tree to determine any sort of genetic or hereditary susceptibilities that you might have to both physical disease and mental illness and you might also ask yourself questions in just terms of general functionality and general real world adjustment.

You know, maybe you have an anger problem or maybe you are overweight as I gave an example for, maybe you want to exercise more but you don’t (I’m in that category at the moment). Maybe you want to make some other drastic change, maybe you want to quit smoking, the change goes on and on…

Any change you have, every person is different and what worked for one person may not necessarily work for you because of your given susceptibilities and the environmental conditions that you’ve found yourself in that may cause you to actually experience the problem when someone else who has almost identical conditions, maybe lacking environmental influence, they didn’t end up in the same position as you.

It’s a good thing to consider, it’s a good place to start in terms of especially figuring out more of your foundations for: how did the problem develop and why is it there? Not just “what do I do about it now that it’s here?”

Figure out why it’s there, and how it got there in the first place. Thanks for watching.

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