Psychological Disorders Flashcards
What are psychological disorders?
Behavioural or psychological syndromes or patterns
Lead to clinically significant distress or disability
How does the DSM-5 define psychological disorders?
According to the DSM-5, a psychological disorder is a “clinically significant disturbance in an individual’s cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior” that is “usually associated with significant distress or disability in social, occupational, or other important activities”
abnormal psychology
Seeks to characterize nature and origins of psychological disorders
clinical psychology
Assessment and treatment of psychological disorders
What three things must a syndrome NOT be in order to qualify as a psychological disorder?
- Expectable response to common stressors and losses
- Culturally approved response to a particular event
- Simple deviance
Point prevalence
Percentage of people in a population who have a disorder at a given time
Lifetime prevalence
Percentage of people in a population who have a disorder at any point in their lives
What is a clinical assessment?
Used to evaluate a person’s psychological functioning and determine whether a disorder is present.
What is a clinical interview? (3)
Clinical interviews systematically explore a client’s current mental state, life circumstances, and history.
Structured interview
Asking specific questions in a specific sequence, while paying attention to certain types of content
What are self-report measures and projective tests frequently used for?
Supplementing a clinical interview.
What 3 parts of a patient’s presentation do clinicians look for when doing assessments?
- What clients say
- Their behaviour
- Discrepancy between 1 and 2
What is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)?
Created in 1930s, was trimmed down and now has 338 questions, often used in clinical practice and to assess people for high risk jobs.
What is a projective test? What’s wrong with them?
Clinicians present unstructured or ambiguous stimuli and ask patient to respond to it, e.g. Thematic Apperception Test where client has to say what is going on in a picture.
Time consuming and expensive to deliver and very mixed evidence about their validity. However some specific ones, such as the Adult Attachment Projective Picture System, have more evidence of reliability and validity than others.
When was the most recent edition of the DSM published?
2013
In what edition of the DSM was homosexuality removed and when was it published?
III, published in 1980
Name a culture-specific disorder
Bulimia
Dhat syndrome–South Asian disorder characterized by severe anxiety about release of semen
Shenjing Shuariuo–Chinese, fatigue, dizziness, headaches
Ataque de nervois–central/south american, wide variety of symptoms inc. anxiety, anger, aggression
What are the 4 main goals of the DSM-V?
- Be as useful as possible for clinicians and clients
- Ensure changes from previous editions are based on research and evidence
- Maintain continuing with previous editions
- Reflect current scientific evidence
Name two benefits of diagnostic labels
- Better treatment
a. Know which treatment to provide
b. Allows different clinicians to coordinate care
c. Can provide individuals with self-knowledge and motivation to seek treatment- More precise research
a. Operationalization
b. Find prevalence
c. Direct resources to prevalent disorders
- More precise research
Name two costs of diagnostic labels
- Stigmatization
- Over-emphasis on separation between each disorder–people are not binary
a. Encourages clinicians to see diagnoses as fixed and enduring–70s study where healthy people were admitted to hospital
b. Hinders search for common, underlying mechansisms
What’s one way treatment providers try to distinguish between the person and the disorder?
“People with x” language rather than “xic” language. Lol. Oops.
What’s the diathesis-stress model of psychological disorders?
Provides an overarching framework to understand how disorders arise by looking at how diathesis–things that create predispositions for a disorder, which can be either psychological or biological–can combine with stressors (stressful circumstances) to result in a mental disorder. Based on biopsychosocial model of psychological functioning.
Name some types of diathesis that contribute to the development of psychological disorders? Give an example of each.
- Early life experience
- Cognitive/psychological e.g. learned helplessness
- Social
- Genetic factors
- Biological factors
What are the 3 types of anxiety-related disorder in the DSM?
- Anxiety disorders
- Obsessive compulsive disorders
- Trauma and stressor related disorders