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Psychological Disorders

Terms in this set (17)

Disorders
Patterns of thoughts, feelings, or actions that are deviant, distressful, and dysfunctional
Disorder: state of mental health
Patterns: finding a collection of symptoms that tend to go together
Distress and Dysfunction: Interfere with one's daily life
Deviant: differing from the norm
Classifying Disorders
1. Diagnoses create a verbal shorthand for referring to a list of associated symptoms
2. Diagnoses allow us to statistically study many similar cases learning to predict outcomes
3. Guide treatment choices

DSM easier to count cases of autism spectrum disorder if we have a clear definition
Justify payment for treatment
Consistent with diagnoses used by medical doctors worldwide
Critiques of DSM
1. Call too many people "disordered"
2. Border between diagnoses or between disorder and normal seems arbitrary
3. Decisions about what is a disorder seems to include value judgement; is depression necessarily deviant?
4. Diagnostic labels direct how we view and interpret the world, telling us which behavior and mental states to see as disordered
Abnormal depends on..
-The personal values of a given diagnostician
-The expectations of the culture in which a person lives
-The exceptions of the person's culture of origin
-General assumptions of human nature
-Statistical deviation from the norm
-Harmfulness, suffering, and impairment
3 Criteria for Abnormality
-Distressing to self or others (Hotch laughing uncontrollably)
-Deviant: Violates social norms (The milk prank)
-Dysfunctional for person or society (Woman holding carrots, laughing)
"Deviant"?
-In general, means to vary from what typically would happen
-A behavior or mental state is considered deviant by a culture when it is different from what would be expected in that culture
-A disorder may also be a deviation from a typical developmental pathway
Role of Context of Deviant
Whether a behavior varies from expectation depends on the situation in which the behavior occurs
EX yelling for hours is not deviant when it happens at a football game. Painted faces might seem deviant to another country
Historical Explantations
Abnormal Behavior caused by:
-Supernatural forces/demonic possession
-Witchcraft
Trephination: chiseling a hole in the skull to allow evil spirits to escape

Hippocrates: Mental illnesses are just like physical disorders
Freudian: beginning f psychological explantions
Philippe Pinel and others sought to reform brutal treatment by promoting a new understanding of the nature of mental disorders
Proposed that mental disorders were not caused by possession, but by environment factors such as stress and inhumane conditions
"Moral treatment" involved improving the environment and replacing asylum beatings with patient dances
...
The discovery that the disease of syphilis causes mental symptoms (by infecting the brain) suggested a medical model for mental illnesses
Medical Model
Psychological disorders can be seen as psychopathology, an illness of the mind
Disorders can be diagnosed, labeled as a collection of symptoms that tend NOT FINISHED
The Biopsychological Approach
Biological Influences
-Evolution
-Genes
Psychological Influences
Social-Cultural Influences
Anxiety Disorders
Anxiety: tension and apprehension that is a natural response to a perceived threat
Disorders: Frequency and intensity of anxiety responses
NOT FINSIHED
Four Components of AD
-Subjective-Emotional
-Cognitive (Thinking about)
-Physiological (Like stress)
-Behavioral (What we do)
Generalized Anxiety Disorder
...
Panic Dip
...
Incidence: number of new cases that occur during a given period
Most prevalent disorders in the US
18.6% of population
More frequent in woman tahn men iefjhiwoefrj
...
Phobias
Strong irrational fears of certain objects or situations
Degree
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