Mental Disorders Flashcards
What is a mental disorder?
Alterations in thinking (cognition), mood, or behavior associated with significant distress and impaired functioning (impaired functioning = interfere with daily activities, relationships)
What constitutes significant distress (to qualify as a mental disorder)?
Normal to experience sadness, especially after difficult life event.
Significant =
- duration: depressive feelings last abnormally long time after stressful event, dependent on situation
- quality: intensity of feelings (ex: suicidal thoughts vs just feeling a little down)
What is psychosis? What are the symptoms?
A “loss of touch with reality”
- hallucinations = see/hear things that aren’t actually there (sensory)
- delusions = false beliefs, paranoia, not based in reality (persecutory and of grandeur)
- disordered thinking = thinking that doesn’t make sense, irrational, illogical, not linear
Two types of delusions and examples?
1) Persecutory delusions = someone is following me/trying to control me/watching me (government put a chip in my brain, cops are looking in my windows)
2) Delusions of grandeur = believe they are a certain person (I am Jesus reborn, I’m married to Ryan Reynolds)
What are most common mental disorders in Canada?
#1 = mood and anxiety disorders (11.7%) #2 = substance abuse (5.9%) #3 = cognitive impairment/dementia (2.2%)
What are the 4 main causes (etiology) of mental disorders?
- genetic factors
- biological factors
- psychological factors
- social factors
What is the etiology of psychosis/schizophrenia?
1 = genetics (50% of the risk is from genetics)
- maternal nutrition
- viral infection (mom sick during preg/kid born in virus seasons)
- perinatal complications (issues during birthing)
- exposure to toxins, chemicals, loud/dirty environments (either when mom preg or when younh kid)
- social stress (death of child/close relation, demanding job, immigrants and children of immigrants)
What is the etiology of affective disorders? (mood etc)
- genetics (complicated mess of genetic markers, less telling than for schizophrenia)
- other medical conditions (high rate of concurrence between mood disorders and lots of other health issues)
- gender: women more likely than men (hormones crazy change at certain life phases)
- age (adolescence and elderly)
- abuse
- loss/rejection/isolation
- general stress
- substance abuse (sometimes disorder caused by it, sometimes disorder causes it)
What did Leonard Pearlin and colleagues do in relation to stress and mental illness?
They studied depression rates in people recently unemployed, compared differences between the people who were and werent depressed
What did Leonard Pearlin and colleagues conclude with their research?
People who did develop depression after unemployment…
- had lower self esteem
- placed higher value on financial success (vs having other things be more important)
- reported low levels of emotional support (no family, lost only friends with work)
- high levels of external locus of control (factors outside of selves control their lives / internal = I’m in control, I can change this)
What did Alexander Leighton do in relation to stress and mental illness?
Studied role of environment/social ecology in the etiology of mental illness. Hypothesized that communities with ‘high disintegration’ were more likely to have higher mental illness rates.
What is a disintegrated community according to Alexander Leighton?
(Similar to Durkheim anomie stuff..)
- recent history of disaster (community members died, weather disaster, etc)
- excessive poverty (overall low socioeconomic status)
- cultural confusion (conflicting cultural groups - racial, ethnic, religious)
- rapid social change (ex: lottsss ppl left/arrived to community in a short period)
What did Alexander Leighton say about individual stress?
There is a common core/’bundle’ of main strivings/needs (similar to Maslow Hierarchy)
- physical security
- sexual satisfaction
- love
- security
- individual recognition
- sense of belonging to group
- orientation toward oneself and ones place in society/social group
- spontaneity/creativity
- belonging to moral order
- feeling of being ‘right in what one does’
What was the historical biological treatment (psychiatry) for mental illnesses?
- blood-letting (flush out them toxins)
- lobotomies (take out that piece of brain causing psychotic symptoms)
- insulin therapy (shock the body)
- electro-convulsive therapy (shock the body)
Now we use medications intended to alter neurotransmitters
What was the historical psychological (psychology) treatment for mental illnesses?
- thereapeutic communities (remove person from toxic environment/community and get em into a healthy one with group meals and activities but still independance)
- catharsis = psychoanalytic theory (Freud: people ill because of repressed emotions, so need talk to someone and get it all out (release!), sometimes use hypnosis)
Who explained the growth of the asylum and why did it happen?
Edward Shorter 1997
- More illness was showing up with neurosyphilis creating psychological conditions
- less available places (b/c workhouses closed and jails full)
- less people tolerant of family members with psychotic illnesses
- increased legitimacy of medicine/psychiatry
- asylum seen as more humane environment
Why did deinstitutionalization happen?
- laws were being questioned by the hippiieessss
- people who refused to go to war had to work in asylums instead and began to expose them to the media
- promise of community mental health services
- political economic influences (medicare stuff) so mentally ill person was $$$ to gov
What were the results of deinstitutionalization?
- poverty (inadequate financial support even with medicare –> mentally ill people often homeless)
- homelessness
- suicide
- imprisonment (b/c people called the cops on mentally ill people when they were having trouble)
- substance abuse
- violence (mainly against mentally ill, but sometimes they were instigators)
- family stress (family forced to care for person without money or training)
- victimization
