This essay will describe and explain the vulnerability-stress model with how it identifies and treats psychiatric disorders in a stressful environment. It will also explain how in a real life practise with a client with anxiety disorders symptom fluctuates during the stressful life events. Zubin and Spring (1977) states a highly vulnerable person is one to experience in a life event an episode. The argument is to see whether the client or person develops symptoms from a stressful life event or has a pre-existing vulnerability to develop a significant psychopathology (p.109) Zubin and Spring (1977) published a journal article that outlines the stress and vulnerability model. They construct a graph for clients to have an active role to reduce the vulnerability to stress. The graph describes the concept of the vulnerability to clients when they are exposed to stressful life events. It shows people who have a low vulnerability may react better to another person who has a high level of vulnerability and high level of stress where they develop significant psychopathology. Also in their article they mention that stress occurs in a person's life that is unable to cope. Therefore, the person's vulnerability determines how it can cause them to get sick with psychosis. .
The vulnerability-stress model is described as a warning sign for the client to identify stresses before the psychotic episode occurs. This model is mentioned by Gaston (2014) to be used to make the client aware of the factors in psychotic pathology. Zubin and Spring (1977) mentions the client acquires the vulnerability in psychosis through genetic predisposition or as a result of an environment insult to the brain, such as trauma or stressful living condition or even family conflicts. Studies show that the model of psychosis is born with a level of vulnerability to stress and they also investigated stress and psychosis is more focused on relapse rather than onset.