STUDY QUESTIONS

Question 1

Examples that suggest autism in “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time”

Answer 1

1. Attention to time
2. Lack of understanding social cues (facial expressions, jokes, metaphors, situations)
3. Fixations (space, numbers, physics)
4. Rigidity in routine/choice (breakfast- cannot have a brown cereal and brown tea)
5. Aversion to touch and eye contact

Question 2

Psychological Impairment

Answer 2

Psychological impairment is when a pattern of behavioral, cognitive, emotional, and/or physical symptoms shown by an individual are disrupting his or her life and causing distress, disability, and the potential risk of further suffering or harm

Question 3

Why do adolescents engage in such risky behavior? Describe various biological & behavioral factors that influence how and why adolescents take risks.

Answer 3

-brain maturation not complete
- driven by reward
-evolutionary advantage
-hormones
- peer effects
- behavioral contributions (sleep & SUDs)

Question 4

What is the health paradox of adolescence and why does it matter? What’s happening in the brain during the adolescent years?

Answer 4

Healthiest in our youth, but more likely to take risks and die;
- Tension between the early emerging ‘bottom up’ systems that express exaggerated reactivity to motivational stimuli, such as the ventral striatum region, and their later maturing ‘top down’ cognitive control regions, such as the prefrontal cortex.
- Synaptic pruning period, in which their brain’s network of synapses grows but the synapses that are not regularly used get pruned
- Dopamine is higher in the brain
- Testosterone and oxytocin are at high levels too

Question 5

How can we help children and adolescents to be more resilient against mental illness?

Answer 5

• by raising them with an appropriate role model of their gender
• Girls who display resilience come from households that combine risk taking and independence with support from a female caregiver
  -boys who display resilience come from households in which there is a positive male role model along with structure, rules, and some encouragement of emotional expression
• less unsupervised time, more authoritative parenting, less screen time, delay their school start times, make condoms available, and provide targeted drug education and school based mental health clinics

Question 6

How do we evaluate children and adolescents for mental illness? What is the rationale for the way in which we complete clinical evaluations?

Answer 6

To understand the entirety of behavioral/social capacity and help the observable problems. Want to interview parents and kids, see how they’re performing physically/academically/socially etc. Very thorough process

Question 7

How has children’s mental health been dealt with throughout history?

Answer 7

Try to highlight key milestones and the progression of mental health: Ex. The evolution of theories provided by people like John Locke, Pinele, Rush, Dix, etc. Also brief about Era’s like the Industrial era, Freud’s era, etc and how mental health was viewed/changed at the time

Question 8

Autism levels of severity

Answer 8

Level 1: requiring support
Level 2: requiring substantial support
Level 3: requiring very substantial support