Psychological Disorders 1/2

Question 1

The Four D’s

Answer 1

• What is considered normal or abnormal varies between people, culture and time periods, making it difficult to define this behavior.
• The four D’s were classified by clinicians:
  1. Deviance
  2. Distress
  3. Dysfunction
  4. Danger

Question 2

Deviance

Answer 2

• idea that abnormal thoughts, emotions, and behaviours deviate from those deemed acceptable by society.
• we define abnormality by whether or not the individual’s behaviour is accepted by the culture to which that individual belongs.
  EX. minority practices

Question 3

Distress

Answer 3

• Intense negative feelings such as anxiety, sadness, or despair due to behavior may be indicative of a psychological disorder.
• Some exceptions where a person who is free of distress is not necessarily psychologically healthy.
  EX. Bipolar patients in the manic phase often feel extremely elated and larger than life–certaining not distressed.
  EX. Patients with antisocial personality disorder are also known to feel no remorse or distress when causing harm to others.

Question 4

Dysfunction

Answer 4

• Behaviors that are dysfunctional are often described as “maladaptive” because they prevent an individual from adapting well to their environment
• impaired ability to perform everyday functions.
  EX. Person may voluntarily choose to stop functioning in society as a means of protest

Question 5

Danger

Answer 5

• Either to oneself or another
• Clear and obvious: person who engages in risky behaviors that lead to drug addition or violence
  Does not prove that psychological disorder exists alone
  EX. Athletes who participate in extreme sports

Question 6

DSM

Answer 6

• Main function is to categorize and describe mental disorders so that clinicians have a common set of criteria for applying a diagnosis label to the symptoms of their patients.
• Works by listing the diagnosis criteria for a particular mental disorder, allowing clinicians to see whether a patient’s symptoms match a specific disorder.
• Does not list possible causes of these disorders, potential treatment, or risk and prevention–rather it is a manual for the assessing and diagnosing of mental disorders based on symptoms.

Question 7

Categorical Classification Model

Answer 7

• Categories are defined as rigid boundaries, and individuals can only belong to one specific kind of category in a mutually exclusive manner.

Question 8

Dimensional Classification Model

Answer 8

• psychological disorders are often more fluid than rigid.
• Dimensional classification model classifies items from each other in degree.
• Dimensional classification better describes psychological disorders which can often overlap in symptoms, risk factors, and underlying causes.
  EX. Autism spectrum

Question 9

Criticism of DSM-5

Answer 9

• Comorbid individuals suffer from more than one discret disorder, but its also possible that our diagnostic criteria simply overlaps too much.
  EX. Patients diagnosed with anxiety disorder also often present with symptoms of major depression, and these comorbid complications matter when trying to diagnose and treat a patient as a whole.
• DSM remains the most widely accepted and comprehensive diagnostic system for classifying psychopathology.

Question 10

Epidemiology

Answer 10

• Refers to the study of the distribution of health-related states and disorders within a population
  Psychological disorders often differ based on sex and culture.
  EX. major depressive disorder is diagnose twice as often in women as it is in men
  EX. Collective cultures like Japan, people suffering from social anxiety typically fear offending others in social situations, whereas in individualist cultures like Canada, these individuals usually fear self-embarrassment.

Question 11

Prognosis

Answer 11

• which is the probable course of an illness.
• Chronic, acute, episodic

Question 12

Prevalence

Answer 12

• Prevalance is the percentage of a population that exhibits that disorder during a specific time period.
• Point, annual, lifetime

Question 13

Symptomatology

Answer 13

• Defined as the collection of behaviors, thoughts or feelings that may be a potential indicator of a specific psychological disorder.
• This process is complicated by heterogeneity where the same psychological disorder often present with different symptoms, in varying degrees of severity, in different patients.

Question 14

Depression

Answer 14

• Episodes of Major Depression are recurrent, but if left untreated, can last for several months
  In between episodes, a person usually returns to normal functioning
• However, person can experience harmful effects in aspects of social well-being and physical health, risk of suicide.

Question 15

Generalized Anxiety Disorder

Answer 15

• Severe anxiety disorder: suffer from intense, prolonged fear, tension and distress that can feel overwhelming and interfere with their relationships and the daily tasks of living.
• GAD always feels tense, and this can lead to dizziness, sleep problems, muscle tension, headaches, fatigue, sometimes even nausea. They have difficulty concentrating and can often feel irritable.

Question 16

Schizophrenia

Answer 16

• It is hard to find specific symptoms that are shared by all persons with this diagnosis. Instead, patients often have a combination of different types of symptoms.
• described as either positive or negative
• Positive: describe the addition of abnormal behaviours, like hallucinations and delusions
• Negative: describe the absence of typical behaviours, as in loss of speech or loss of pleasure from eating.

Question 18

Positive

Answer 18

• generally acute, appearing only for brief periods at a time, and point to the addition of an abnormal behaviour.
• The most well-known positive symptom of schizophrenia is hallucinations, disorganized thinking and motor behaviour (cataonia excitment/ stupor).
• Hallucinations are perceptions of things that are not really there
• Most common are auditory hallucinations where individuals hear voices saying negative things in their head
• Common delusions include believing that one is being persecuted by others, or that one’s thoughts are being manipulated.

Question 19

Negative

Answer 19

• decrease in the individual’s engagement with the outside world.
• become less interested in people and real world events, and more concerned with internal ideas or fantasies. This may lead to a growing estrangement from family and coworkers, and an increasing neglect of one’s personal appearance.
• Negative symptoms include:
  1. Alogia (reduction in speech)
  2. Anhedonia (inability to feel pleasure and lack of emotions)
  3. Asociality (inability to engage in social interaction)
  4. Avolition (lack of motivation)

Question 20

Etiology

Answer 20

• Etiology is the cause, or set of causes of a disorder.

Question 21

Complexity of Etiology

Answer 21

• For any given disorder, there are several potential causes, and multiple unique causes may operate simultaneously.

Question 22

Biological Model

Answer 22

• Also known as medical or disease models assume that a psychological disorder results from malfunction in the brain.
• Usually points to genetics, atypical neurotransmitter activity, or abnormal brain structures.

Question 23

Genetics

Answer 23

• Twin studies provide insight into genetic etiology. If two twins share a trait, they have concordance.
• If identical twins are more likely to share a specific disorder than fraternal twins, we can conclude that genetics play a larger role in that disorder etiology.
• Once researchers have determined there is a genetic component to a disorder, they try to identify the specific genes involved

Question 24

Environmental Model

Answer 24

• Consider the effects of environmental factors, such as where we live, who we socialize with, and what we consume, and how these impact psychopathology.

Question 24

Brain Structures

Answer 24

• Other researchers take a holistic perspective by analyzing abnormalities in the brain structure of patients with psychological disorders.
• Patients with various anxiety disorders were found to have a hyperactive amygdala.

Question 24

Neurotransmitters

Answer 24

• Abnormal levels of neurotransmitter activity in the brain seem to be linked with psychological disorders.
  EX. Depressed patients often have low levels of dopamine and norepinephrine activity.
  EX. Serotonin and GABA are often implicated in the etiology of anxiety

Question 25

Schizophrenia

Environmental Model

Answer 25

• Etiological explanation is the diathesis-stress model → schizophrenia is thought to develop when a genetic predisposition, or diathesis, is paired with environmental stress.
• But it is still unclear how environmental events trigger schizophrenia symptoms → its is believed that stress and problems with relationships–especially immediate family–are leading causes

Question 26

Diathesis-Stress Model

Answer 26

• Individuals who are born with a high diathesis need only experience a minimal amount of life stress to develop the disorder, whereas individuals with low diathesis who experience the same amount of stress, are unlikely to develop the same severity of symptoms.

Question 27

The behavioral model

Answer 27

• how external factors produce disordered behaviors and emotions.
• According to the behavioral model, the external factors themselves are not the issue, but rather, our behavior and emotions in response to them