Alternative frameworks for understanding mental distress include medical model and behavioural frameworks

Alternative frameworks for understanding mental distress include medical model and behavioural frameworks. The medical model works with the assumption that problems in areas of our lives such as thinking, feeling, relating and behaving are best understood through medical terminology involving a vocabulary of symptoms, diagnosis and prognosis.
Biological and medical frameworks view psychological problems as result of physical causes such as brain defects, hereditary factors or as the results of accidents or injury. Behavioural frameworks are closely aligned to learning theories rather than biological problems. Behavioural frameworks indicate that the symptoms of mental distress are learned habits that arise from the interaction between external stressors that include, the physical environment, including your job, your relationships with others, your home, and all the situations, challenges, difficulties, and expectations you’re confronted with on a daily basis, and the individual’s personality and abilities to manage these life stresses. Those who promote the medical model do not ignore questions to do with meanings, relationships and values, these questions are understood to be secondary concerns whereas the behavioural frameworks use these symptoms In the initial diagnosis and prognosis of the illness.