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Abnormal Psychology > (1) Defining abnormality and history of mental disorders > Flashcards

(1) Defining abnormality and history of mental disorders Flashcards

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1
Q

What is abnormality?

A
  • Statistical infrequency
  • Violation of norms
  • Personal distress
  • Disability / dysfunction
  • Unexpected response
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2
Q

What is it meant by Violation of norms?

A
  • Behaviour not tolerated by society, e.g. flashing, or eating people
  • Values are cultural, contextual. Streaking, mooning, stripping
  • Many behaviours do not offend society, but are considered abnormal, e.g. depression
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3
Q

What criteria can diagnose a mental disorder?

A
  • No single criteria is sufficient to diagnose mental disorder.
  • But a combination of several criteria may be more reliable
  • In all cases, context and culture must be taken into account.
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4
Q

What is a -Diagnosis?

A

identification and labelling of disorder, based on signs, symptoms, case history, and laboratory findings

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5
Q

What did Thomas Szasz think about diagnosing mental issues?

A
  • The state controls people through diagnosis
  • Income goes to the state for ‘health control’
  • Behaviours are defined more as ‘diseases’
  •  Drugs dispensa3on is controlled by the state, and only available on diagnosis
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6
Q

What did Thomas Szasz believe individuals had the right to do?

A
  • Right to commit suicide
  • Take dugs
  • Live dangerously
  • Annoy others without punishment (treatment)
  • To be odd
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7
Q

What were psychological disorders believed to be due to in the ancient times?

A
  • Symptoms of psychological disorders
  • Spirits and possession: only bad if the spirit is bad…
  • Treated by religious figures
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8
Q

What did the greeks and romans believe about mental disorders?

A

Hippocrates: Separated medicine from religion, magic and superstition, father of modern medicine
-Brain: consciousness, intellectual life, emotion (brain is responsible)

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9
Q

What did Middle Ages 500-1500 say about mental health?

A
  • Churches gained influence
  • Supernatural explanations, including sin
  • Mass madness (could be response to situation)
  • A period of depression, hunger and plague
  • Treatment: Exorcism
  • Witch hunting
  • Change of religion
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10
Q

What happened with Witch Hunting ?

A
  • Supress powerful females
  • Records not kept, but estimates range between 100,000 to millions killed
  • 6:1 female to males
  • Scapegoats for all ill: illness, death, war, failure of crops
  • Easy prey
  • Restored sense of control to society
  • Closely linked with sex: torture and confession, image as sexual agent, sex with Satan
  • Targeted powerful female healers.
  • E.g. Joan of Arc
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11
Q

What happened in the Pre-Humanism period?

A
  • Slow emerging idea of ‘sickness’
  • Criticism of witch hunting
  • Beginning of the confinement of the mentally ill
  • The move from family control to state control (asylum hospitals)
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12
Q

What happened to witchcraft in the pre-humanism period?

A
  • Attempt to gain control or break free socially seen as mental illness
  • Same obsession with sexual behaviour
  • Psychiatrists replaced inquisitors
  • ‘Science’ replaced theology
  • Still about power
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13
Q

What were private institutions like?

A
  • Pre 18th century very few confined
  • In Britain, a ‘trade in lunacy’ existed
  • Run by Doctors- or laymen
  • Some charging high fees
  • Secluded and secret- no safeguards.
  • Poorly regulated
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14
Q

Why were people put into institutions?

A
  • Wives confined to allow husbands free play
  • Used to punish disobedient daughters
  • Very little documentation
  • Mainly women
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15
Q

What was Samuel Brackshaw’s story?

A
  • A merchant who had a series of ‘brushes with the law’ (1770)
  • Carried off to a private asylum
  • 9 months in prison conditions, with no heating, no treatment
  • Released by his brother, wrote two pamphlets
  • However, admits that while confined, heard voices.
  • Became unwell from situation
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16
Q

What was William Belcher’s story?

A
  • Locked up between 1778-1795
  • Judged insane by a jury that had not seen him
  • Kept in filth, force fed, estates seizes
  • Released by a Bethlem doctor
  • Claimed sane when confined, but driven to madness- the purpose of the asylum.
17
Q

What was Puberty for women like in the 18th century?

A
  • Restrictive roles: Excluded from medicine, education, politics, law, economics, writing and all science
  • No control over finance
  • Little control over marriage: sex slavery?
  • Restrictive clothing
  • Terror over bodily functions
  • Curtailment of exercise and hobbies
  • Rebellion perceived as mental disorder.
  • Not made aware of bodily changes
18
Q

What were Signs of insanity?

A
  • Mischievous and excited
  • Attempt to take on ‘boy’ roles
  • Flaunting sexuality
  • ‘Moral perversion’- craving stimulants
  • Impolite
  • Adulterous, pregnant outside marriage, raped
  • Postpartum depression, suicide and infanticide
19
Q

What are the General clusters of ‘insane’ women?

A
  • The sexual woman
  • The hysterical teenager
  • The fasting girls
  • The drunks.
  • The frigid spinster
  • The lesbian
20
Q

What was Work in asylums like?

A
  • Cleaning, sewing, ironing. Had to be manual labour
  • Considered an essential part of treatment (stopped complaints, reduced talking, focused aggression towards task)
  • 6:30 to 5.00, 6 days a week
  • Minimised machinary- hand labour desired
21
Q

What were Cures for female insanity?

A
  • Incarceration, chaining
  • Deviation from Lady like behaviour resulted in solitary confinement, sedation, cold baths, seclusion in padded cells
  • Prevention: girls kept in the nursery, drank milk, avoided meat- delaying menstruation.
  • Controlling sexual urges:
  • Injecting ice water into the rectum
  • Leeching pubic area
  • Clitordectomy
22
Q

Dr Isaac Baker Brown’s Surgery 1859-1866

A
  • Get them while they’re young (as young as 10)
  • Five cases of insanity defined by wish for divorce.
  • Signs of insanity: restless, excited, or loss of appetite, but most strongly, wish to escape, to work, especially as nurses
  • Very successful: almost complete submission post-surgery
23
Q

Women who are ‘cured’ are:

A
  • Silent
  • Have decorum
  • Have taste
  • Service
  • Have piety
  • Have gratitude.
24
Q

What was treatment like in the 18th century?

A
  • Treat because you’re unwell
  • Removed the chains of people imprisoned
  • Light and airy rooms replaced dungeons
  • BEGUN TO TREAT THE INMATES AS SICK HUMAN BEINGS RATHER THAN AS BEASTS
25
Q

Who was Emil Kraepelin (1856-1926)?

A
  • creator of the first system of psychiatric classification
  • Regarded psychiatry as part of the state’s responsibilities
  • Physical factors (such as) fatigue= mental disfunction
26
Q

Moral treatment approach

A
  • Drugs were the most common treatment, including alcohol, cannabis, opium, choral hydrate, …
  • Less than 1/3 of the patients were discharged as improved or recovered
27
Q

What was the Mental hygiene movement?

A

-Dorothea Dix (1802-1887)
-Method of treatment that focused almost exclusively on the physical well-being of hospitalised mental patients
Administered by physicians
-Focused on the biological and physical aspects of illness

28
Q

What was General Paresis?

A
  • Siphilis (caused by microorganism)
  • General Paresis – paralysis and insanity, then death
  • Discovery through:
  • Accurate description of symptoms leading to diagnosis as mental disorder (1825)
  • Inoculation of paretic patients with syphilitic matter- no infection (thus relationship)(1897)
  • Blood test- bacteria. (1906)
29
Q

What is mental disorders like in the 20th century?

A
  • Biological discoveries
  • Development of a classification system for the mental disorders
  • Emergence of Psychological causation views
  • Experimental Psychological research
  • Freud and behaviourism

Abnormal Psychology (7 decks)

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