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
What two symptoms are present in both specific phobias and social anxiety disorder?
- Intense fear
2. Avoidance
What is a specific phobia?
A specific phobia is an intense fear of a particular object or situation, such as snakes, bridges, or heights. Lifetime prevalence 13%.
What is social anxiety disorder?
Social anxiety disorder involves an intense fear of being watched, evaluated, and judged by others. Lifetime prevalence 13%. May be “performance only”.
What is panic disorder?
Anticipation and experience of panic attacks, sudden episodes of terrifying bodily symptoms (like labored breathing, choking, sweating, or heart palpitations) and a sense of going insane and losing control. Panic attacks seem to come out of the blue rather than due to a specific situation.
What is agoraphobia?
A fear of being in situations in which help might not be available or in which escape might be difficult or embarassing
Why does panic disorder often lead to agoraphobia?
Fear of having a panic attack in a public place.
What is generalized anxiety disorder?
- Relentless and pervasive anxiety related to a number of different events and activities.
- A common feature is worry, which some clinicians believe is a cognitive form of avoidance that serves to decrease anxiety responses
- Somatic symptoms
- Lifetime prevalence of 6%.
What is OCD?
- Anxiety disorder characterized by obsessions and compulsions.
- Obsessions: recurrent unwanted and disturbing thoughts
- Compulsions: ritualistic actions done to control obsessions, such as repeated handwashing or checking to make sure stove is off
- Lifetime prevalence of 2%. 1/3rd develop it in childhood.
What symptom of OCD most predicts more severe impairment and a chronic course?
Mental rituals.
What are trauma- and stressor- related disorders?
- Triggered by one or more events that involve actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violation
- Acute stress disorder: lasts 1 month or less
- PTSD: lasts 1 month or longer, lifetime prevalence 7%
- It isn’t well understood why only 1 in 10 people who experience highly traumatic events go on to experience PTSD
What are the two stages of a trauma or stressor related disorder?
Common to initially experience a period of dissociation, followed by intrusive symptoms, arousal symptoms, and avoidance symptoms
Are flashbacks always accurate representations of the traumatic event?
They often are, but they can be composites, or they may include things that were imagined at the time.
What are the 3 main types of symptoms of trauma and stressor related disorders?
- Arousal
- Avoidance
- Negative alterations in cognition and mood
Where are the adrenal glands located?
ON TOP OF THE FUCKING KIDNEYS
What causes anxiety-related disorders? 3 points
- Biological risk factors include: genetic profile, propensity to activate brain regions such as those associated with fear learning
- Psychological risk factors such as fear learning and negative experiences are also thought to play an important role
- The fact some phobias are more common than others may be a result of natural selection favoring those who were predisposed to fear certain things
Concordance rate
Probability that someone with a particular family relationship with a person with a disorder will develop that disorder.
What’s the concordance rate for anxiety in identical twins compared to fraternal twins?
5 times
What do fMRI studies tell us about the cause of specific phobias vs PTSD?
- Specific and social phobias: fear learning–amygdala and insula
- PTSD: less activated of prefrontal cortex i.e. emotional regulation
Affective disorder
Mood disorder
Anhedonia
Diminished interest or pleasure in nearly all activities that previously provided pleasure
What is major depressive disorder? 3 points
- Feelings of sadness, or emptiness and anhedonia
- Depressed mood for most of the day, nearly every day, for more than 2 weeks + a number of other symptoms
- Must cause clinically significant distress or impairment
How common is major depressive disorder? When is it most common?
- Very common. Twice as likely in women than in men. Rumination, turning emotional difficulties over and over in your mind, might be what makes it more common in women.
- Most common in adolescence through to middle adulthood.
How many different ways are there to quality for a depression diagnosis?
16,400!
What two illnesses does the WHO rate severe depression on par with in terms of associated level of disability?
Quadriplegia and terminal cancer
What’s the number one cause of years lost to illness worldwide?
Depression
What are psychotic delusions in depression?
Unshakable false beliefs. E.g. it would be better if I’d never been born, I’m the worst person in the world. More severe, more likely to recur, more likely to lead to death.
When does the gender gap for depression emerge?
Teenage years
What is bipolar disorder? When does it occur?
- Both manic and depressive episodes, with normal periods of mild-to-moderate symptoms interspersed
- Episodes may be as short as a few hours or as long as a few months, and they don’t need to alternate
- Can occur in both children and adults
- Lifetime prevalence of 4%
What is disruptive mood dysregulation disorder?
Childhood disorder characterized by defined by frequent temper outbursts and a persistently angry or irritable mood, ongoing rather than episodic