Ch. 15 - Psychological Disorders Flashcards
biopsychosocial model
An approach to sort out the symptoms and causes of mental disorders
mental disorder
- A persistent disturbance or dysfunction in behaviour, thoughts, or emotions that causes significant distress or impairment
- People with mental disorders have problems with their perception, memory, learning, emotions, motivation, thinking, and social processes.
medical model
- An approach that conceptualizes abnormal psychological experiences as illnesses that, like physical illnesses, have biological and environmental causes, defined symptoms, and possible cures.
- The first step is to determine the nature of the problem through diagnosis => assessing signs (objectively observed indicators of a disorder) and symptoms (subjectively reported behaviours, thoughts, and emotions)
Disorder vs Disease vs Diagnosis
Disorder = A common set of signs and symptoms Disease = A known pathological process affecting the body Diagnosis = A determination as to whether a disorder or disease is present
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)
- The DSM is a classification system that describes the symptoms used to diagnose each recognized mental disorder and indicates how the disorder can be distinguished from other, similar problems.
- In 2013, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) released an updated manual, the DSM-5.
- The DSM-5 describes 22 major categories containing more than 200 different mental disorders.
comorbidity
The co-occurrence of 2 or more disorders in a single individual
epidemiology
The study of the distribution and causes of health and disease
Cultural Formulation Interview (CFI)
The CFI includes 16 questions that the clinician asks a client during a mental health assessment in order to help the clinician understand how the client’s culture might influence the experience, expression, and explanation of his or her mental disorder.
The DSM distinguishes between 3 important concepts when it comes to cultural differences…
- Cultural syndromes = are groups of symptoms that tend to cluster together in specific cultures
- Cultural idioms of distress = are ways of talking about or expressing distress that can differ across cultures
- Cultural explanations = are culturally recognized descriptions of what causes the symptoms, distress, or disorder
What is a specifiable pattern of causes called when referring to disorders?
etiology
Prognosis
A typical course over time and susceptibility to treatment and cure
biopsychosocial perspective
Explains mental disorders as the result of interactions among:
- biological factors = genes, brain structure, hormones
- psychological = learning, perceptions, memory
- social factors = support, environment, culture
The diathesis stress model
-Suggests that mental illness develops when a person who has some predisposition or vulnerability to mental illness (the “diathesis”) experiences a major life stressor (the “stress”)
Research Domain Criteria Project (RDoC)
-A new initiative that aims to guide the classification and understanding of mental disorders by revealing the basic processes that give rise to them.
- The 5 domains included in the RDoC:
1. Negative Valence Systems
2. Positive Valence Systems
3. Cognitive Systems
4. Systems for Social Processes
5. Arousal/Regulatory Systems
anxiety disorder
- The class of mental disorders in which anxiety is the predominant feature
- Most common type of mental health problem (affects about 1 in every 10 Canadians)
Among the anxiety disorders recognized in the DSM-5 are:
- phobic disorders
- panic disorder
- generalized anxiety disorder
Phobic disorders
- Disorders characterized by marked, persistent, and excessive fear and avoidance of specific objects, activities, or situations.
- An individual with a phobic disorder recognizes that the fear is irrational but cannot prevent it from interfering with everyday functioning.
Specific phobia
A disorder that involves an irrational fear of a particular object or situation that markedly interferes with an individual’s ability to function.
Fall into 5 categories:
- animals )ex. dogs, cats, rats, snakes, spiders)
- natural environments (ex. heights, darkness, water, storms)
- situations (ex. bridges, elevators, tunnels, enclosed places)
- blood, injections, and injury
- other phobias (ex. choking, vomiting, loud noises, or costumed characters)
Approximately 12% of people in the US and Canada will develop a specific phobia during their lives, with rates higher in women than men.
Social phobia
- A disorder that involves an irrational fear of being publicly humiliated or embarrassed.
- Social phobia can be restricted to situations such as public speaking, eating in public, or urinating in a public bathroom or generalized to a variety of social situations that involve being observed or interacting with unfamiliar people.
- Individuals with social phobia try to avoid situations where unfamiliar people might evaluate them, and they experience intense anxiety and distress when public exposure in unavoidable.
The preparedness theory
- The idea that people are instinctively predisposed towards certain fears.
- Proposed by Martin E.P. Seligman (1971)
- Phobias are particularly likely to form for objects that evolution has predisposed us to avoid
- Temperament => increased shyness as infant, may possibly have higher chance of developing phobia later on in life
- Neurobiological factors => abnormalities in the neurotransmitters serotonin and dopamine are more common in individuals who report phobias
- Individuals with phobias sometimes show abnormally high levels of activity in the amygdala
panic disorder
-A disorder characterized by the sudden occurrence of multiple psychological and physiological symptoms that contribute to a feeling of stark terror
- The acute symptoms of a panic attack typically last only a few minutes and include:
- shortness of breath
- heart palpitations
- sweating
- dizziness
- depersonalization (a feeling of being detached from one’s body)
- derealization (a feeling that the external world is strange or unreal)
- fear that one is going crazy or about to die
agoraphobia
-A specific phobia involving a fear of public places
Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD)
A disorder characterized by chronic excessive worry accompanied by 3 or more of the following symptoms:
- restlessness
- fatigue
- concentration problems
- irritability
- muscle tension
- and sleep disturbance
