WCS40 An Introduction To Psychiatry Flashcards
Brain as an organ
- Complexity: Understanding of brain requires sophisticated conceptual tools
- High impact on experience and behaviour
- Rich interaction with environment
Mental illnesses
- Disorders of the brain
- Involving complex **cognitive and **emotional responses
- Interaction with the ***person’s life experience (Lebenswelt)
- ***Centralised rather than peripheral systems (Wernicke)
- Complex partial modular system —> Large degree of overlapping (i.e. ***no pathognomonic symptoms)
- Information disorder (cannot handle information)
Brain as an information handling organ
Activity pattern within a structure encode information
Information as the output of the brain
- Brain converts energy into information
- Information defined as ***inverse of disorder
- Reduction in number of possible states (behavioural responses in a given environmental context)
- Brain handles information with representations
What is information?
Information = Inverse of disorder (entropy)
In physical system: Disorder (entropy) increases with time
In biological system: Information (biological forms) can be trapped by replication and physical and biological environmental selection (evolution) and increases with time
In cultural system: Information (ideas) can be trapped by replication and semantic selection and increases with time
Computational unit of brain
Cortical area: ***Population of neurons (instead of single neuron)
Domain of central brain representation
Representation of the world in the mind
- I
- Self
- Body
- Proximal environment
- Distal environment
- TOM (***theory of mind: our theory of what other people are thinking in their mind) —> often goes wrong in psychiatric illnesses
- COM (***community of mind: our theory of how people interact with each other)
Perception: Interaction between **External sensation + **Internal representation (goes wrong in psychiatric disorders)
Psychopathology: Symptoms and Signs of psychiatry
Phenomenology
Phenomenology:
- Provide a foundation from which explorations of individual experience can proceed with clarity
- “Subject experience as appearing to the mind” as the starting point
- Objectively look at Subjective experience
Lifeworlds
- Subjective experience of everyday life
- Most fundamental form of knowing
- Empirical knowledge is but one special form of human knowing
Subjective experience
- Communicable via language
- but only to a certain extent
Taxonomy in Psychopathology
- Disorders of perception
- Disorders of thought and speech
- Disorders of memory
- Disorders of emotion
- Disorders of experience of the self
- Disorders of consciousness
- Disorders of motor control
Taxonomy of perceptual symptoms
Perception
—> Distortion vs Deceptions
Signs and Symptoms of mental disorders
- ***Experiential symptoms dominates
- BUT Signs can be observed (except that they are in brain vs in other specialties e.g. responding to your questions)
- Symptoms have individualised components (forms and contents)
- Involvement of agency and communicate “self” in illness
Requirements for conditional empiricism
- Psychopathology need to articulate under what circumstances subjective information may be empirical
- ***Disciplined dialogue mediate communication
- ***Communicable experiences can be empirical
- ***Information value to be determined empirically
Role of Psychiatry
- Managing the ***Brain
- Synaptic modulation: GABA, dopaminergic, serotoninergic, adrenergic, cholinergic
- Neurogenesis: exercise
- Neuroprotection: agents, lifestyle
- Neurostimulation: TMS, tDCS, ECT - Managing the ***Reaction to illness
- psychological intervention
—> hope
—> insight
—> thinking habit
—> mindfulness
—> relationships
—> self-stigma
—> personality - Managing the ***Lebenswelt (personal life experience)
- treatment environment
- family
- social
- culture
- work
- physical environment
