CP: Introduction and history

Question 1

What is Stigma?

Answer 1

The destructive beliefs and attitudes held by a society that are ascribed to groups considered different in some manner

Question 2

What are the four characteristics of stigma

Answer 2

• A label is applied to a group of people that distinguishes them from others (e.g. “crazy”)
• The label is linked to deviant or undesirable attributes by society (e.g. crazy people are dangerous)
• People with the label are seen as essentially different from those without the label, contributing to an “us” vs “them” mentality (e.g. we are not like those crazy people)
• People with the label are discriminated against unfairly (e.g. a clinic for crazy people can’t be built in our neighbourhood)

Question 3

Are psychological disorders stigmatized?

Answer 3

Psychological conditions are the most stigmatized of conditions.

Question 4

Is stigma experienced across the world? Are countries doing anything about it?

Answer 4

Stigma is experienced highly in most countries, even in ones where anti-stigma programs have been implemented

Question 5

Strategies to reduce stigma

Community strategies

Answer 5

• Housing options
  
  • However, many neighbourhoods are reluctant to embrace the idea of people with a psychological disorder living among them
• Education
  
  • Won’t completely eradicate stigma, but it may help lessen people’s hesitancy to talk about their illnesses
• Personal contact
  
  • Far more effective than education in reducing stigma

Question 6

Strategies to reduce stigma

Mental health and health profession strategies

Answer 6

• Mental health evaluations
  
  • Using evaluations to prevent psychological disorders by using rating scales to help identify problems before they become more serious
• Education, training, and support

Question 7

Individual and Family strategies

Answer 7

• Education for individuals and families
• Support and advocacy groups
  
  • Education won’t reduce it alone
    
    • Knowing more is linked to a greater desire for more social distance from people with psychological disorders

Question 8

What are two key factors in reducing stigma?

Answer 8

Contact and familiarity can reduce stigma.
Contact reduction persists a year later
Generally, Familiarity is associated with less stigma
However, greater familiarity is associated with greater stigma

Question 9

What constitutes a disorder?

What criterion does our textbook use to define psychological disorder (PD/PDs)

Answer 9

• Distress
• Disability and dysfunction
• Violation of social norms

Other abnormal psych textbooks use different criterion, which is why this is called The Criterion Problem

Question 10

What constitutes a disorder?

Is it easy to define boundaries for disorders/symptoms

Answer 10

No!
* The location of the boundary in defining disorders and behaviours as abnormal is difficult
* It has to be decided by the clinical community as it is arbitrary

Question 11

What constitutes a disorder?

If you want to classify a disorder for an individual, what procedures should you use?

Answer 11

Using mechanical, statistical, and actuarial procedures to classify disorders/predict outcomes often works better than clinical judgements

Question 12

How does the DSM-5 define a mental disorder?

Answer 12

• The disorder occurs within the individual
• It involves clinically significant difficulties in thinking, feeling, or behaving
• It usually involves personal distress of some sort, such as in social relationships or occupational functioning
• It involves dysfunction in psychological, developmental, and/or neurobiological processes that support mental functioning
• It is not a culturally specific reaction to an event
• It is not primarily a result of social deviance or conflict with society.

Question 13

What are the three characteristics of PDs?
(psychological disorders if you forgot)

Answer 13

• Personal distress
  
  • Not all PDs cause distress
    
    • e.g. an individual with antisocial personality disorder may violate the law without experiencing any guilt
• Violation of social norms
  
  • This way of defining PDs is too broad and too narrow
• Disability and dysfunction
  
  • Disability: Impairment in an important part of life
  • Dysfunction: something that has gone wrong and isn’t working as it should.
    
    • DSM definition refers that developmental, psychological, and biological dysfunctions are interrelated.

Question 14

Are these characteristics always present?

Answer 14

General comment is that not all disorders have these characteristics, but they are still disorders
Shits wild yknow

Question 15

Early history of Psychopathology

How were PDs explained through supernatural causes?

Answer 15

• Behaviour seemingly out of individual control was ascribed to supernatural causes, like how natural disasters were.
• Many believed that disturbed behaviour reflected the displeasure of the gods or possessions by demons
  
  • This lead to exorcisms

Question 16

Early history of Psychopathology

How did Hippocrates explain PDs via a biological cause?

Answer 16

• Hippocrates regarded the brain as the organ of consciousness and thought that disordered thinking and behaviour were indications of some kind of brain pathology
• He classified PDs into mania; melancholia; and phrenitis (brain fever).
  
  • Healthy functioning depending on the balance of the four humours (blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm)

Question 17

Early history of Psychopathology

What happened in the European dark ages?

Answer 17

• The death of Galen as the beginning of the Dark Ages.
• Basically religion rose and people went back to believing demons and the devil caused things.
  
  • Monks sometimes provided treatment in monasteries
• Lunacy trials started occurring in England, where people could be judged insane and be protected by the Crown.

Question 18

Early history of Psychopathology

When did asylums start appearing? How were they viewed?

Answer 18

• Old leprosy hospitals were converted to asylums
• The Priory of St. Mary of Bethlehem was founded in 1243 in England, and began housing people with PDs in 1547.
• Bedlam began being used as a name (meaning a place of wild uproar and confusion)
  
  • Bethlehem became a tourist attraction in London, and it was considered entertainment to view the “lunatics”
• Benjamin Rush is considered the father of American psychiatry, but he believed some crazy shit like PDs being caused by excess blood in the brain, so he’d just draw a fuck ton of blood

Question 19

Early history of Psychopathology

How did a Frenchman reform asylums?

Answer 19

• Philippe Pinel (1745-1826) was important for the movement for more humane treatment of people with PDs in asylums.
  
  • He believed that his patients were first and foremost human beings, and these people should be approached with compassion and understanding and treated with dignity
    
    • He was also classist so yknow… be humble
• Moral Treatment (treating the patients morally) became a thing in the early 19th century, at the end, it went down because of low funding.

Question 20

Historical antecedents of contemporary views: Biological approaches

What is General paresis?

Answer 20

Steady deterioration of both mental and physical abilities and progressive paralysis

Question 21

Historical antecedents of contemporary views: Biological approaches

How is syphilis linked to increased interest in biological approaches to psychology?

Answer 21

• Syphilis was believed to be linked with general paresis, and this was confirmed in 1905 when the specific microorganism that causes syphilis was discovered.
  
  • A causal link was established between infection, damage to certain areas of the brain, and a form of psychopathology.
    
    • This led to further biological approaches because of increased credibility

Question 22

Historical antecedents of contemporary views: Biological approaches

How did interest in genetics further psychology?

Answer 22

• Francis Galton was the originator of genetic research, he coined nature and nurture.
  
  • His genetic research into twin heredity led to interest in the idea that psychological disorders run in families.
    
    • He also created the eugenics movement so… be humble

Question 23

Historical antecedents of contemporary views: Biological approaches

What biological treatments arose from poor conditions and staff shortages in asylums?

Answer 23

Experimentation with radical interventions started taking place
* Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) was created by Italian physicians as a way to treat/simulate epileptic seizures.
* It’s still used today to treat schizophrenia and depression by inducing seizures.
* Prefrontal lobotomy was created by Egas Moniz in 1935, it no bueno

Question 24

Historical antecedents of contemporary views: Psychological approaches

Who started using psychological approaches to treat PDs?

Answer 24

Psycholgical approaches first started appearing in the late 18th century in France and Austria
* Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815) believed that hysteria could be treated by influencing one’s magnetic fluid. This was a early form of hypnosis
* Charcot supported hypnosis in Paris after his students showed him it working.
* Due to Charcot’s prominence in Parisian society, this form of treatment was legitimized

Question 25

Historical antecedents of contemporary views: Psychological approaches

How did Josef Breuer create the first form of psychoanalysis?

Answer 25

• Breuer used hypnosis as a way to get “Anna O.” (one of his patients with hysterical symptoms) to talk about her past and past emotions.
  
  • This coalesced in a form of catharsis, where Anna O. supposedly got better by releasing emotional tension.

Question 26

Historical antecedents of contemporary views: Psychological approaches

Who was inspired by Breuer?
What 3 assumptions made by him are still commonly held today?

Answer 26

Daddy Freud!
Freud then was inspired to propose his psychoanalysis theories because of this
Insert freudian bs about the id and his defence mechanisms blah blah here

Freud had influence on modern day in the following commonly held assumptions
* Childhood experiences help shape adult personality
* There are unconscious influences on behaviour
* The causes and purposes of human behaviour are not always obvious

Question 27

Historical antecedents of contemporary views: Psychological approaches

The rise of behaviourism

Answer 27

The book mentions the following things, I assume you know the conditionings
* Classical conditioning
* Operant conditioning
* Modelling: learning through observation, used by Bandura with teaching kids that dogs are ok by showing a fearless model patting a dog

Question 28

Historical antecedents of contemporary views: Psychological approaches

The importance of cognition

Answer 28

• From 1960s onward, the study of cognition became prominent.
  
  • Researchers and clinicians realized that the ways in which people think about, or appraise, situations can influence behaviour in dramatic ways.
    
    • This led towards the development of cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT)

Question 29

Have we learned from our history?

Answer 29

yes but no, look at tv shows like Hoarders, they are similar to aristocrats viewing the patients at Bethlehem for entertainment.
Basically the book says that we should be mindful of the past methods so we don’t revert back to them

Question 30

The mental health professions

Answer 30

• Clinical psychologists
  
  • Requires Ph.D.
• Psychiatrists
  
  • Requires M.D. degree
• Psychiatric nurse
  
  • Training at bachelor’s or master’s level
• Social workers
  
  • M.S.W. degree