Chapter 1 - Introduction to Psychopathology Flashcards
What 4 terms characterize abnormal behaviour?
- Deviance or violation of (social) norms (these differ across cultures)
- Distress ( not all disorders are distressing)
- Dysfunction (!)
- Danger (to themselves or those around them)
*Statistical infrequency is also a consideration, as well as a diagnosis by an expert
What is the formal DSM-5 definition for abnormal behaviour?
- “Clinically significant disturbance in an individual’s cognition, emotion regulation, or behaviour”
- Exclusion criteria - Expected/culturally sanctioned response to a particular event (grieving) or purposeful, deviant behaviour (ex. political dissent), and conflict between the individual society (ex. expressing individualism)
What are some significant statistics regarding mental health diagnoses in Canada?
- In any given year, 1 in 5 Canadians experience a mental disorder or an addiction problem
- 70% of mental disorders have their onset during childhood/adolescence
- Lower education is tied to poor mental health
- 12 suicides a day
- In any given week, at least 500 000 employed Canadians are unable to work due to mental health problems
What does the term disease burden mean?
- The extent of functional impairment and loss associated with a health problem
How do epidemiologists measure disease burden?
- Combine mortality (premature death) and disability (lost years of healthy life, years of living with disability)
What are the major components of Freud’s Classical Psychodynamic Paradigm?
- Believed the motivations for many behaviours were unconscious
- Many conflicts within the mind are repressed
The mind is divided into 3 structures: Id (pleasure principle), ego (reality principle), and superego (moral principle)
-Libido is expressed in a series of psychosexual stages (oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital) - Oedipus complex can cause the phallic stage to be unresolved
- Defense mechanisms are unconscious processes that serve to protect the ego
How does Freud’s Classical Psychodynamic theory explain the presence of mental disorders?
- He believed that mental disorders were caused by:
1) The fixation at certain developmental stages caused by trauma or parental neglect
2) The inability to defend against overwhelming emotions originating from internal conflicts or past traumas (i.e., whether defense mechanisms breakdown
What are the different categories of defense mechanisms?
- Primitive defenses (start in childhood): Denial, regression, projection
- Higher level defenses (allow for management for emotions): repression, intellectualization, reaction formation, and displacement
- Mature defenses (socially acceptable): Humour supression, sublimation
*Trauma can make it more difficult to develop more advanced DM
What’s the more current psychodynamic paradigm?
Gabbard’s Object Relations Theory:
- Much of mental life is unconscious (same as Freud)
- Childhood experiences and genetics shape adult and their susceptibility to mental disorders
- Early experiences of self with others and associated emotional states are internalized to produce representations of those interactions (called objects). These objects are hard to change.
- If internal representations defective, it will significantly affect relationships. Tjis is where symptoms of mental disorders appear
- Symptoms and behaviours are determined by complex and often unconscious forces (similar to Freud)
What are the differences found between Gabbard’s Level of Personality Organization psychodynamic paradigm?
- Neurotic level - Superego well integrated but punitive, high-level defenses, stable identity, good objects, good personal strengths, pathology is based in conflict, relatively good perception and representation of others
- Borderline level - superego integration is minimal, primitive defenses, identity diffusion, object relations split in ‘all goo or all bad’, weak ego, pathology includes serious deficits in addition to conflicts, poor perception and representation of others
What are some of the learning theories found in the Cognitive Behavioural Paradigm?
- Abnormal behaviour is learned like any other behaviour:
1) Classical Conditioning - coditioning of an involuntary behaviour (ANS), including emotions
2) Operant conditioning - the conditioning of voluntary behaviour (SNS). How we correct certain aspects of psychopathological behaviours
3) Social learning theory - Learning of complex social behaviours via observations of patterns of reinforcement and punishment in social situations
What does the Cognitive Behavioural Paradigm describe?
- More a set of theories that share 3 principles:
1) Thinking affects emotions and behaviours (i.e., how people interpret what happens in their lives)
2) Thoughts can be motivated and changed
3) By altering one’s thoughts, aperson will experience desired behavioural and emotional change (change the way you think > change the way you feel > change the way you act.
How does the Cognitive Behavioural Paradigm explain mental disorders?
- Mental disorders are either caused/heavily influenced by the individuals cognitive appraisals of events, including events that happen within an individual
What’s Rational Emotive Therapy (RET)?
- A part of the cognitive behavioural paradigm, developed by Albert Ellis
- Includes the ABC model: the consequences of life events are not just the result of activating events but are mediated by one’s beliefs about these experiences (A - events in life, B - what we think of A, C - what we do)
What does Aaron Beck’s Cogntiive theory describe?
- Emotions and behaviours are heavily influenced by individuals beliefs and cognitive appraisal
- Describes 3 main levels of cognition:
1) Schemas (top level processing)
2) Info processing and intermediate beliefs
3) Automatic thoughts (bottom level processing) - Goal is to reach schematic level to make lasting change
- CBT involves bringing a person’s attention to their automatic thoughts, their info processing errors, and eventually their schemas
