Resilience: More Than Preventing Negative Outcomes

Resilience is typically studied as either a recovery/ bouncing back factor where you return to baseline levels of functioning before an acute stressor had occurred, or as a sustainability factor where you continue performing/ adapting well despite the presence of a chronic stressor. How resilience is typically operationalised, in terms of outcome, is whether the individual survives the acute trauma/stressor and/or chronic stress and still remains psychopathology free. If he doesn’t then he is non resilient, but if he indeed remains free of negative outcomes then he is resilient. Sometimes, very rarely, in case of trauma, the concept of post traumatic growth is studied, whereby an individual actually grows following the traumatic experience. While that is important, today I wish to discuss something different. First if resilience is about preventing negative outcomes or psychopathology, we need to understand why psychopathology happens in the first place. One popular model to understand psychopathology is the stress-diathesis model. Basically, what the model says is that there is some vulnerability in the individual (diathesis) and some adverse life experiences (stress) the individual is subjected to, and that combination may lead to psychopathology or negative outcomes. Now daithesis is your pre-psychopathology brain biochemistry that is affected by your genetic makeup and your early childhood experiences. The genes and early environment cumulatively m...
Source: The Mouse Trap - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: resilience flourishing psychopathology Source Type: podcasts