Southern New Hampshire University

COU 510

Are Charlie’s symptoms of depression and anxiety due to biological or environmental factors?
Support your response using this week’s assigned readings.
I think the depression and anxiety symptoms that Charlie is
experiencing in the case study is caused by environmental factors and
biological factors. The environmental factors Charlie has endured do
seem to be the main cause to me but I don’t think I would be looking at
the whole picture without the biological aspect as well.
when Looking closer at Charlies situation we know her boyfriend
just proposed to her and now this onset of concerning behaviors have
started. The pressure to make a life altering decision could stir up these
mental health issues because of the environmental experiences she has
been through and the biological factors passed down to her. For
example, Charlie’s boyfriend, jack, gets violent when he drinks, they
have a history of domestic violence, and she knows how that affected
her own family since This situation is a pattern she is repeating from her
childhood. Charlie grew up with a father who drank heavily and was
violent to both her and her mother. Charlie disapproved of her fathers
behavior but still managed to put herself in the exact same situation
and now finds her friends disapproving of her partner choice.
Albert Bandura’s theory of social learning states that people
learn from one another via observation, imitation, and modeling. I
think this proves true for Charlie, she observed her mother accept her
fathers behavior and in turn imitated the samebehavior. But other
sociocultural aspects should be noted…growing up in a religious house
has left Charlie with guilt about her father and boyfriends drinking
problems and having critical parents could have contributed to her
choices she made to end up in the situation she is in.
But we need to look biologically too. Could there have been a
predisposition for mental health issues? With a father who drinks is it
possible he was struggling mentally? If there was biological factors also
in play then we should look at Erickson’s theory which focuses on both
the biological and genetic origins of behavior as interacting with the