The Scope and Nature of Psychological Disorders

• Abnormal Behavior:  as behavior that is personally distressing, personally dysfunctional, and/or so culturally deviant that other people judge it to be inappropriate or maladaptive

Historical Perspectives on Deviant Behavior

• Vulnerability-Stress Model: each of us has some degree of vulnerability (ranging from very low to very high) for developing a psychological disorder, given sufficient stress

Anxiety Disorders

• Anxiety: the state of tension and apprehension that is a natural response to perceived threat

• Anxiety Disorders:  the frequency and intensity of anxiety responses are out of proportion to the situations that trigger them, and the anxiety interferes with daily life

• Phobias:  are strong and irrational fears of certain objects or situations

• Agoraphobia: a fear of open or public places from which escape would be difficult

• Social Phobias: excessive fear of situations in which the person might be evaluated and possibly embarrassed

• Specific Phobias: such as a fear of dogs, snakes, spiders, airplanes, elevators, enclosed spaces, water, injections, or germs

• Generalized Anxiety Disorder: is a chronic (ongoing) state of diffuse, or free-floating, anxiety that is not attached to specific situations or objects

• Panic Disorders: occur suddenly and unpredictably, and they are much more intense

• Obsessions: are repetitive and unwelcome thoughts, images, or impulses that invade consciousness, are often abhorrent to the person, and are very difficult to dismiss or control

• Compulsions: are repetitive behavioral responses that can be resisted only with great difficulty

• Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD):  is a severe anxiety disorder that can occur in people who have been exposed to traumatic life events

• Neurotic Anxiety:  occurs when unacceptable impulses threaten to overwhelm the ego’s defenses and explode into consciousness or action

• Culture-Bound Disorders: which occur only in certain locales

Somatoform and Dissociative Disorders: Anxiety Inferred

• Hypochondriasis: people become unduly alarmed about any physical symptom they detect and are convinced that they have or are about to have a serious illness

• Pain Disorder: experience intense pain that is either out of proportion to whatever medical condition they might have or for which no physical basis can be found

• Conversion Disorder: in which serious neurological symptoms, such as paralysis, loss of sensation, or blindness, suddenly occur

• Dissociative Disorders: involve a breakdown of normal personality integration, resulting in significant alterations in memory or identity

• Psychogenic Amnesia: a person responds to a stressful event with extensive but selective memory loss

• Psychogenic fugue: is a more profound dissociative disorder in which a person loses all sense of personal identity, gives up her or his customary life, wanders to a new faraway location, and establishes a new identity

• Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID): (formerly called multiple personality disorder), two or more separate personalities coexist in the same person

• Trauma-Dissociation Theory: the development of new personalities occurs in response to severe stress

Mood Disorders: Depression and Mania

• Mood Disorders:  which include depression and mania (excessive excitement)

• Major Depression: an intense depressed state that leaves them unable to function effectively in their lives

• Dhythmia: a less intense form of depression that has less dramatic effects on personal and occupational functioning

• Bipolar Disorder:  depression (which is usually the dominant state) alternates with periods of mania

• Mania:  a state of highly excited mood and behavior that is quite the opposite of depression

• 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

Schizophrenia

• Schizophrenia: includes severe disturbances in thinking, speech, perception, emotion, and behavior

• Delusions: false beliefs that are sustained in the face of evidence that normally would be sufficient to destroy them

• 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

• Disorganized Schizophrenia: whose central features are confusion and incoherence, together with severe deterioration of adaptive behavior, such as personal hygiene, social skills, and self-care

• Catatonic Schizophrenia: characterized by striking motor disturbances ranging from muscular rigidity to random or repetitive movements.

• 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.

• Negative Symptoms: an absence of normal reactions, such as lack of emotional expression, loss of motivation, and an absence of speech

• Dopamine Hypothesis: the symptoms of schizophrenia— particularly positive symptoms—are produced by overactivity of the dopamine system in areas of the brain that regulate emotional expression, motivated behavior, and cognitive functioning

• Regression: in which a person retreats to an earlier and more secure (even infantile) stage of psychosocial development in the face of overwhelming anxiety

• Social Causation Hypothesis:  attributes the higher prevalence of schizophrenia to the higher levels of stress that low-income people experience

• Social Drift Hypothesis: proposes that as people develop schizophrenia, their personal and occupational functioning deteriorates so that they drift down the socioeconomic ladder.

Personality Disorders

• Personality Disorders: exhibit stable, ingrained, inflexible, and maladaptive ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving

• 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

• Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD): refers to a collection of symptoms characterized primarily by serious instability in behavior, emotion, identity, and interpersonal relationships.

• Splitting: the failure to integrate positive and negative aspects of another’s behavior

• Attention Deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): problems may take the form of inattention, hyperactivity/impulsivity, or a combination of the two.

Scientific and Social Issues In Diagnosis

• Reliability: means that clinicians using the system should show high levels of agreement in their diagnostic decisions

• Competency: refers to a defendant’s state of mind at the time of a judicial hearing

• Insanity: relates to the presumed state of mind of the defendant at the time the crime was committed__.__