Week 6: Psychological Disorders Part 2 Flashcards
Symptoms of Depression
Emotional Symptoms: The negative mood state is the core feature of depression, they most commonly report sadness, misery and loneliness. Whereas people with anxiety disorders retain their capacity to experience pleasure, depressed people lose it. Activities that used to bring satisfaction and happiness feel dull and flat.
Even biological pleasures, such as eating and sex, lose their appeal.
Cognitive symptoms: Depressed people have difficulty concentrating and making decisions. They usually have low self-esteem, believing that they are inferior, inadequate and incompetent. When setbacks occur in their lives, depressed people tend to blame themselves; they await failure that will be caused by their own inadequacies. Depressed people almost always view the future with great pessimism and hopelessness
Motivational symptoms: inability to get started and to perform behaviours that might produce pleasure or accomplishment. Everything seems too much of an effort. In some cases of severe depression, the person’s movements slow down and she or he walks or talks slowly and with excruciating effort.
Somatic (bodily) symptoms: loss of appetite and weight loss in moderate and severe depression, whereas in mild depression, weight gain sometimes occurs as a person eats compulsively. Sleep disturbances, particularly insomnia, are common. Sleep disturbance and weight loss lead to fatigue and weakness, which tend to add to the depressed feelings. Depressed people may also lose sexual desire and responsiveness.
Symptoms of Bipolar Disorder
When a person experiences only depression, the disorder is called unipolar depression. In bipolar I disorder , depression alternates with periods of mania , a state of highly excited mood and behaviour that is quite the opposite of depression.
In a manic state, the mood is euphoric and cognitions are grandiose. The person sees no limits to what he or she can accomplish and fails to consider the negative consequences that may ensue if these grandiose
plans are acted on.
Course of Mood Disorders
Once a depressive episode has occurred, one of three patterns may follow:
In perhaps 40 percent of all cases, clinical depression will not recur following recovery.
The second pattern: recovery with recurrence, occurring in about 50 per cent of people. On average, these people remain symptom-free for perhaps 3 years before experiencing another depressive episode of about the same severity and duration.
Finally, about 10 percent of people who have a major depressive episode will not recover and will remain
chronically depressed
Causal factors in depressive and bipolar disorders
Biological factors: Genetics and Neurochemicals -> the behavioural inhibition system (neuroticism) and the behavioural activation system (extraversion)
Psychological factors: Personality-based vulnerability ( early traumatic losses or rejections)
Cognitive processes: Depressive cognitive triad involves negative thoughts concerning (1) the world, (2) oneself and (3) the future & depressive attributional pattern , attributing successes or other positive events to factors outside the self while attributing negative outcomes to personal factors & learned helplessness theory , holds
that depression occurs when people expect that bad events will occur and that there is nothing they can do to prevent them or cope with them
Learning and environmental factors: triggered by a loss, by some other punishing event or by a drastic decrease in the amount of positive reinforcement that the person receives from her or his environment
Sociocultural factors
Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia includes severe disturbances in thinking, speech, perception, emotion and behaviour.
Literally, the term means ‘split mind’
Characteristics of Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia sometimes entails delusions , false beliefs that are sustained in the face of
evidence that would normally be sufficient to negate these beliefs.
Unwanted thoughts constantly intrude into consciousness.
Some experience hallucinations , false perceptions that have a compelling sense of reality.
The language of people with schizophrenia is often disorganised and it may contain strange
words. Patients’ language sometimes contains words that are based on rhymes or other associations
rather than meaning.
Schizophrenia can affect emotions in a number of ways. Many people with schizophrenia
have blunted affect, manifesting less sadness, joy and anger than most people. Others have
flat affect, showing almost no emotions at all. Their voices are monotonous and their faces
impassive.
Subtypes of schizophrenia
These subtypes are:
Paranoid schizophrenia, whose most prominent features are delusions of persecution, in which people believe that others mean to harm them, and delusions of grandeur, in which they believe they are enormously important. Suspicion, anxiety or anger may accompany the delusions, and hallucinations may also occur in this subtype.
Disorganised schizophrenia, whose central features are confusion and incoherence, together with severe deterioration of adaptive behaviour, such as personal hygiene, social skills and self-care. Thought disorganisation is often so extreme that it is difficult to communicate with these individuals. Their behaviour often appears silly and childlike and their emotional responses are highly inappropriate. They are usually unable to function on their own.
Catatonic schizophrenia, characterised by striking motor disturbances ranging from muscular rigidity to random or repetitive movements. People with catatonic schizophrenia sometimes alternate between stuporous states, in which they seem oblivious to reality, and agitated excitement, during which they can be dangerous to others. While in a stuporous state, they may exhibit waxy flexibility, in which their limbs can be moulded by another person into grotesque positions that they will then maintain for hours.
Undifferentiated schizophrenia, a category assigned to people who exhibit some of the symptoms and thought disorders of the above categories but who do not have enough of the specific criteria to be diagnosed in those categories.
Classes of Schizophrenia symptoms
One type is characterised by a predominance of positive symptoms , such as delusions, hallucinations
and disordered speech and thinking. These symptoms are called positive because they represent pathological extremes of normal processes, or the addition of something unusual to normal experience or behaviour.
The second type features negative symptoms —an absence of normal reactions, such as lack of emotional expression, loss of motivation and an absence of speech.
Causal factors in schizophrenia
Biological factors:
- Genetic predisposition
- Brain abnormalities
- Biochemical factors (overactivity of dopamine)
Psychological factors
- Retreat from unbearable stress and conflict
- Extreme example of the defence mechanism of regression , in which a person retreats to an earlier and more secure (even infantile) stage of psychosocial development in the face of overwhelming anxiety
- Interpersonal withdrawal
- Sensory input overload
Environmental factors
- Stressful life events - seem to interact with biological or personality vulnerability factors.
- Family dynamics
Sociocultural factors
- Prevalence of schizophrenia is highest in lower-socioeconomic populations
-The social causation hypothesis attributes the higher prevalence of schizophrenia to the higher levels of stress that low-income people experience, particularly within urban environments.
- In contrast, the social drift hypothesis proposes that as people develop schizophrenia, their personal and occupational functioning deteriorates, so that they drift down the socioeconomic ladder into poverty and migrate to economically depressed urban environments
Personality disorders
People diagnosed with personality disorders exhibit stable, ingrained, inflexible and maladaptive ways of thinking, feeling and behaving.
When they encounter situations in which their typical behaviour patterns do not work, they are likely to intensify their inappropriate ways of coping, their emotional controls may break down, and unresolved conflicts tend to
re-emerge.
Types of Personality Disorders
The disorders are divided into three clusters that capture important commonalities: dramatic and impulsive behaviours, anxious and fearful behaviours, and odd and eccentric behaviours.
Antisocial personality disorder and psychopathy
People with antisocial personality disorder (APD) seem to lack a conscience; they exhibit little anxiety or guilt and tend to be impulsive and unable to delay gratification of their needs.
People with APD are among the most interpersonally destructive and emotionally harmful individuals.
Causal factors of personality disorders
Biological factors
- Genetic predisposition
- Physiological basis for the disorder might be some dysfunction in brain structures that govern emotional arousal and behavioural self-control, particularly the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex.
- Dysfunction in these two areas would result in behavioural impulsiveness and a chronically underaroused
state that impairs avoidance learning, causes boredom and encourages a search for excitement
- MRIs also reveal that antisocial individuals have subtle neurological deficits in the prefrontal lobes
Psychological and environmental factors
- Lack of a conscience/superego
- the absence of the father
- Impulsive Behaviour
- Learned deviant behaviours from peer groups that both model antisocial behaviour and reinforce it with social approval
Neurodevelopmental disorders
neurodevelopmental disorders are a group of disorders that are known to always manifest at an early age, usually before or soon after the child enters school.
This group includes intellectual developmental disorder, communication disorders, neurodevelopmental motor disorders and specific learning disorders, as well as autism spectrum and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
These disorders are characterised by neurodevelopmental deficits that interfere with the child’s personal, social or academic functioning.
Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder
In attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) , problems may take the form of inattention, hyperactivity/impulsivity or a combination of the two.
Boys are more likely to exhibit aggressive and impulsive behaviours, whereas girls are more likely to be primarily inattentive
Despite many years of research, the precise causes of ADHD are unknown.
