Study unit 6.2 Psychopathology Flashcards
Medical model
Proposes that it is useful to think of abnormal behavior as a disease.
Diagnosis
Distinguishing ones illness from another.
Etiology
Apparent causation and developmental history of an illness.
Prognosis
A forecast about the probable course of an illness.
Deviance
Behavior deviates from what society views as acceptable.
Maladaptive behavior
Everyday adaptive behavior is impaired. Key criteria in substance abuse.
Personal distress
Diagnosis is based on an individual’s report of great personal distress, usually used in the diagnosis of anxiety and depression.
DSM-5
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Released in 2013, it is the official psychodiagnostic classification system, retaining a categorical approach to disorders.
Generalized anxiety disorder
A chronic, high level of anxiety that is not tied to any specific treat.
Symptoms:
Worrying constantly about yesterday’s mistakes and tomorrow’s problems. Worrying about minor matters. Anxiety is accompanied by trembling, muscle tension, diarrhea, dizziness, faintness, sweating and heart palpitations.
Specific phobia
A persistent and irrational fear of an object or situation that presents no realistic danger.
Panic disorder
Recurrent attacks of overwhelming anxiety that usually occur suddenly and unexpectendlty.
Symptoms:
Misiniterpreted heart attacks, apprehensive and hypervigilant
Agoraphobia
Fear of going out to public places.
Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OSD)
Persistent, uncontrollable intrusions of unwanted thoughts (obsessions, these thoughts repeatedly intrude on one’s consciousness in a distressing way) and urges to engage in senseless rituals (compulsions, actions one feels forced to carry out).
Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
Enduring psychological disturbance attributed to the experience of a major traumatic event.
Symptoms:
Reexperiencing the event in the form of nightmares and flashbacks, emotional numbing, alienation, problems in social relations, an increased sense of vulnerability and elevated arousal, anxiety, anger and guilt
Dissociative disorders
Lose contact with portions of their consciousness or memory, resulting in disruptions in their sense of identity.
Dissociative amnesia
Sudden loss of memory for important personal information that is too extensive to be due to normal forgetting.
Symptoms:
Forgetting name, family, where they live, work, wandering away and remembering matters not related to their identity.
Dissociative identity disorder (DID)
A disruption of identity marked by the experience of two or more largely complete, and usually very different, personalities.
(multiple personality disorder)
Symptoms:
Fail to integrate incongruent aspects of their personality into a normal, coherent whole. Each personality has his/her own name, memories, traits, physical mannerism and autonomy. The alternate personalities commonly display traits that are quite foreign to the original personality.
Major depressive disorder
Persistent feelings of sadness and despair and a loss of interest in previous sources of pleasure.
Anhedonia
A diminished ability to experience pleasure.
Bipolar disorder
Experience of both depressed and manic periods.
Schizophrenia
Marked by delusions, hallucinations, disorganized thinking and speech, and deterioration of adaptive behavior.
Symptoms:
1) Delusions + irrational thought
Delusions - false beliefs that are maintained even though they are clearly out of reach with reality.
Believe that private thoughts are being broudcasted, that thoughts are injected into their minds against their will or controlled by some external force
Delusions of granduer - maintain they are famous and important
Thinking becomes chaotic rather than logical and linear.
“Loosening of associations” - shifts topics in disjointed ways.
2) Adaptive behavior deterioration
In the quality of the person’s routine functioning in work, social relations, and personal care.
3) Distorted perception
Hallucinations - sensory perceptions that occur in the absence of a real, external stimuli or are gross distortions of perceptual input.
4) Disturbed emotion
Flatening of emotions and become emotionally volatile.
Autism/Autism spectrum disorder (ASD)
Profound impairement of social interaction and communication and severly restricted interests and activities, usually apparent by age 3.
Symptoms:
Lack of interest in other people
Their ability to initiate and sustain a conversation is limited, and use of language is marked by peculiarities such as echolalia (rote repetition of others’ words)
Preoccupied with objects or repetitive body movements
Extremely inflexible, minor changes in the environment can trigger rages and tantrums.
Personality disorders
Class of disorders marked by extreme, inflexible personality traits that cause subjective distress or impaired social and occupational functioning.
Antisocial personality disorder
Impulsive, callous, manipulative, aggressive, and irresponsible behavior.
Symptoms:
Rarely feel guilty of transgressions
Tolerate little frustration and pursue immediate gratification
