Anxiety, Depression and Addiction Flashcards
What is the brain for?
Organ sensory input
Make sense of sensory and social information (internal models)
Survival (avoid harm physical and social)
Maximise efficiency
What is anxiety?
A constellation of psychological and physiological responses to potential/ uncertain threat.
It exists to automatically motivate us to avoid harm.
What builds/ perpetuates on the state of anxiety?
Avoidance
Poor sleep
Negative automatic thoughts
Attentional and cognitive bias
feeling unsafe, out of control, trapped
What is anxiety disorder?
Excessively intense/ persistent anxiety–> significant distress/ impairment
self-perpetuating network of positive feedback loops, arising from responses which are usually adaptive.
What is depression?
Depression can also be conceptualised as a self-perpetuating network of positive feedback loops arising from normally adaptive responses.
Do you feel like you understand this diagram?
Do you understand this diagram about compulsion?
What is addiction?
Repeated negative reinforcement, in the context of persistent states of suffering/ distress/ tension, is a central part of the development of addictions.
How is addiction linked to opiates/ cocaine?
Addictions have a powerful unconscious component, mediated by the substances’ direct action on neural circuits for motivation and reward-seeking.
What is central to the development of addiction?
The social context of addiction
What type of mechanism is addiction?
Complex mechanism involving repeated negative reinforcement, persistent states of distress, social context and direct action on neural circuits.
What is OCD?
Negative Reinforcement driven by the distress caused by the intrusive thoughts, and cemented by habit-formation, are central to compulsion in OCD.
