Defining Psychological Disorders

• Note that people may be diagnosed with a psychological disorder even if they are not experiencing all, or even most, of the above symptoms.

• Another important point is that the term insane, often used by laypeople to describe psychological disorders in general, is not a medical term.

  • Rather, insanity is a legal term.

• The reason behind the legal definition of insanity is to differentiate between those people who can be held entirely responsible for their crimes (the sane) and those people who, because of a psychological disorder, cannot be held fully responsible for their actions.

• Psychologists use a book called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

• The DSM, as its name suggests, provides a way for psychologists to diagnose their patients.

• The DSM contains the symptoms of everything currently considered to be a psychological disorder.

Categories of Disorders

Anxiety Disorders

• Anxiety disorders, as their name suggests, share a common symptom of anxiety.

• A simple or specific phobia is an intense unwarranted fear of a situation or an object such as claustrophobia (fear of enclosed spaces) or arachnophobia (fear of spiders).

• Agoraphobia is a fear of open, public spaces.

  • People with severe agoraphobia may be afraid to venture out of their homes at all.

• A person who suffers from generalized anxiety disorder, often referred to as GAD, experiences constant, low-level anxiety.

• Someone with panic disorder suffers from acute episodes of intense anxiety without any apparent provocation.

Somatic Symptom and Related Disorders

• Somatic symptom disorders occur when a person manifests a psychological problem through a physiological symptom.

  • An example of such a disorder is conversion disorder.

• People who have conversion disorder report the existence of a severe physical problem such as paralysis or blindness, and they will, in fact, be unable to move their arms or see.

• Behaviorists would say that people with somatic symptom disorders are being reinforced for their behavior

Dissociative Disorders

• Dissociative disorders involve a disruption in conscious processes.

• Dissociative amnesia is when a person cannot remember things and no physiological basis for the disruption in memory can be identified.

  • Biologically induced amnesia is called organic amnesia.

• Dissociative identity disorder, formerly known as multiple personality disorder, is when a person has several personalities rather than one integrated personality.

• Psychoanalytic theorists believe that dissociative disorders result when an extremely traumatic event has been so thoroughly repressed that a split in consciousness results.

• Behaviorists posit that people who have experienced trauma simply find not thinking about it to be rewarding, thus producing amnesia or, in extreme cases, DID.

Depressive Disorders

• Someone with a mood or affective disorder experiences extreme or inappropriate emotions.

• Major depressive disorder, also known as unipolar depression, is the most common mood disorder and is often referred to as the common cold of all psychological disorders.

• Seasonal affective disorder (SAD) is the resulting diagnosis.

  • SAD is often treated with light therapy.

• Psychoanalysts commonly view depression as the product of anger directed inward, loss during the early psychosexual stages, or an overly punitive superego.

• Aaron Beck, a cognitive theorist, believed that depression results from unreasonably negative ideas that people have about themselves, their world, and their futures.

  • Beck calls these three components the cognitive triad.

• Many theories about the cause of depression combine a cognitive and a behavioral component.

  • An example of these social-cognitive or cognitive behavioral theories is Martin Seligman’s idea of learned helplessness.

• Learned helplessness is when one’s prior experiences have caused that person to view him- or herself as unable to control aspects of the future that are controllable.

Bipolar and Related Disorders

• Unlike unipolar depression, bipolar disorder, formerly known as manic depression, usually involves both depressed and manic episodes.

• People experience manic episodes in different ways but they usually involve feelings of high energy.

Schizophrenic Disorders

• Schizophrenia is probably the most severe and debilitating of the psychological disorders.

• The fundamental symptom of schizophrenia is disordered, distorted thinking often demonstrated through delusions, hallucinations, disorganized language, and/or unusual affect and motor behavior.

• Delusions are beliefs that have no basis in reality.

  • Delusions of persecution—the belief that people are out to get you.

  • Delusions of grandeur—the belief that you enjoy greater power and influence than you do, that you are the president of the United States or a Nobel Prize–winning author.

• Hallucinations are perceptions in the absence of any sensory stimulation.

• Schizophrenics often evidence some odd uses of language.

  • They may make up their own words (neolo­gisms) or string together a series of nonsense words that rhyme (clang associations).

• Some schizophrenics suffer from catatonia, a motor problem.

• When motionless, catatonic schizophrenics usually evidence waxy flexibility.

• Positive symptoms refer to excesses in behavior, thought, or mood such as neologisms and hallucinations, whereas negative symptoms correspond to deficits such as flat affect or catatonia.

• One of the most popular ideas about the cause of schizophrenia is biological and is called the dopamine hypothesis.

  • The basic idea behind the dopamine hypothesis is that high levels of dopamine seem to be associated with schizophrenia.

Personality Disorders

• Personality disorders are well-established, maladaptive ways of behaving that negatively affect people’s ability to function.

  • The most important personality disorder with which you should be familiar is antisocial personality disorder.

• The characteristics of many other personality disorders are deducible from the names of the disorders.

• For instance, people with dependent personality ­disorder rely too much on the attention and help of others, and those with paranoid personality disorder feel persecuted.

• Narcissistic personality disorder involves seeing oneself as the center of the universe (narcissism means “self-love”), and histrionic personality disorder connotes overly dramatic behavior (histrionics).

• People with obsessive-compulsive personality disorder may be overly concerned with certain thoughts and performing certain behaviors, but they will not be debilitated to the same extent that someone with obsessive-compulsive disorder would.

• Obsessive-compulsive disorder, known as OCD, is when persistent, unwanted thoughts (obsessions) cause someone to feel the need (compulsion) to engage in a particular action.

• Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) usually involves flashbacks or nightmares following a person’s involvement in or observation of an extremely troubling event such as a war or natural disaster.

• Paraphilias or psychosexual disorders are marked by the sexual attraction to an object, a person, or an activity not usually seen as sexual.

  • For instance, attraction to children is called pedophilia, to animals is called zoophilia, and to objects, such as shoes, is called fetishism.

  • Someone who becomes sexually aroused by watching others engage in some kind of sexual behavior is a voyeur, someone who is aroused by having pain inflicted upon him or her is a masochist, and someone who is aroused by inflicting pain on someone else is a sadist.

• Substance-related and addictive disorders is a diagnosis made when the use of such substances or behaviors like gambling regularly negatively affects a person’s life.

• Children with autism spectrum disorder seek out less social and emotional contact than do other children and are less likely to seek out parental support when distressed.

• Other developmental disorders involve difficulties in terms of developing skills.

  • Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is one example.

The Rosenhan Study: The Influence of Labels

• In 1978, David Rosenhan conducted a study in which he and a number of associates sought admission to a number of mental hospitals.

• All claimed that they had been hearing voices; that was the sole symptom they reported.

• All were admitted to the institutions as suffering from schizophrenia.