[Psychopathology in the social context]

In his treatise "Allgemeine Psychopathologie"(1913) (general psychopathology), Karl Jaspers contrasted the avoidance of methodical one-sidedness, which today is described as being interdisciplinary, and the danger of making partial conceptions absolute. He argued in favor of the combined observation of the psychopathological phenomena of the "natural human being" to be analyzed and explained by scientific (and epidemiological) methods along with understanding the individual case study of the "cultural human being", which a person is as well, by using humanitarian hermeneutic methods. Because he discussed the social context only briefly, we will illustrate this in the following with specific examples: 1. social influences on the contents and forms of the appearance of psychopathological phenomena together with definitions that separate these pathological from abnormal psychic phenomena, 2. social conditions, i.e. imprinting of dispositions as risk factors and the social situation of psychopathological phenomena and 3. their social consequences. Taken together these are arguments for a biopsychosocial model, which, however, to date is seen as arbitrary in respect to causal explanations, which remains vague and which present no rules for weighting the relevance of individual determinants. However, the educational and didactic value of the model, to consider systematically the patient in its entirety, is undisputed and should encourage psychiatrists to investigate in depth the complex constellations of conditions of psychic disturbances on the microlevel.