Week 10 - Culture and Disorders Flashcards
What is culture?
The shared rules/understandings that shape behaviour, norms, and co-existence. It can exist at different levels eg values, attitudes and beliefs
What sometimes gets ignored in the study of culture?
Psychological theories/practices have generally been developed in Western countries such that understandings of human behaviour can be limited/ethnocentric
What are some of the mental health issues faced by Indigenous Australians?
Suicide, depression, isolation, low self-esteem
What are some of the ways we can reduce mental health issues in Indigenous populations
Teaching clinicians about Indigenous language and culture so that they can be more accommodating of the needs of the Indigenous populations.
- ask culturally sensitive questions
Finding preventative measures such as the Deadly Thinking program to educate Indigenous people.
What is classification and diagnosis?
Classification: An overarching taxonomy that is used for categorisation
Diagnosis: The act of placing an individual in a category of a classification system
What is a mental disorder?
A SYNDROME characterised by clinically significant DISTURBANCE in an individual’s cognition, emotional regulation, or behaviour that reflects a DYSFUNCTION in psychological, biological, or development PROCESSES underlying FUNCTIONING.
How are disorders identified?
They are a label given to a group of observable, co-existing symptoms
They are NOT a cause
What are some limitations of the DSM?
- It assumes that every disorder has clear boundaries from other disorders (ie they are all distinct), however, this is not true –> there is a lot of COMORBIDITY whereby people can be diagnosed with multiple medical conditions at once based on their symptoms
- Social and political forces can sway the contents of the DSM (it cannot be a fixed manual)
- It is hard to know what is normal and what isn’t because the symptom cut off for a disorder is arbitrary
What are other classification methods for mental disorders?
Research Domain Criteria Initiative (RDoc)
Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP)
The main goal of the DSM-5 is ___________
To have clinical utility
_______ is the field that blends science, theory, and practice
Clinical Psychology
How do we diagnose Major Depressive Disorder?
Over a 2 week period, an individual needs to present 5 or more of the following symptoms:
1. Depressed mood all the time
2. Loss of interest or pleasure in anything
3. Weight loss or gain
4. Insomnia or Hypersomnia
5. Agitation or retardation
6. Fatigue or loss of energy
7. Worthlessness or excessive guilt
8. Poor concentration and indecisiveness
9. Recurrent thoughts of death
How do we diagnose Persistent Depressive Disorder?
Symptoms must persist for more than 2 years for most days and cannot have a break that exceeds 2 months
Trends in rates of depression
Lifetime prevalence rates are greater than 12-month prevalence rates
Depression prevalence tends to spike increase at age 15
Females have greater rates of depression than men
What rank does suicide have in the leading causes of death?
Which gender is more at risk?
Which type of economy has higher suicide?
In Australia, it is the 13th leading cause of death.
Males are more likely to die from suicide than women
Suicide is higher in developed countries than in undeveloped
