Question: why do mental disorders happen?

Laura Hemming answered on 6 Jun 2018:

This is a pretty big question – there’s about 100 years of research on this! But I’ll try to answer briefly. Mental health disorders tend to be caused by a number of things. There are lots of ‘biopsychosocial’ models of mental health which propose that it’s a combination of biological, psychological and social factors that eventually result in somebody developing a mental health disorder. Biological factors could include genetic predisposition, psychological factors could include experiencing an adverse or traumatic event in childhood and social factors could include living in poverty. It’s generally accepted that there is no one cause of mental health problems, but they are instead a combination of several different factors.