July

Notes:

Schizophrenia: One cause is gating breakdown
Can lead to hallucinations-->mostly auditory
To try to deal with them, some people develop delusions of persecution (like the CIA is planting voices in my head for example)
Other people develop delusions of grander (like it’s God talking to me)
Some people don’t develop delusions (they don’t need an explanation they just realizesomething’s wrong and try to fix it)
Symptoms like these can change over time.
What classifies behavior as abnormal?
The statistical approach: people who fall in the extremes of a spectrum (away from the norm)
Violation of social norms
Distress: personal suffering, torment, very subjective
Disability or dysfunction: do your symptoms make you unable to work? Prevent you from being parents? Etc.Wakefield suggested the criteria of core dysfunctions and that these created the symptoms of the illnesses
He said we needed to identify which core dysfunctions were failing to cure mental illness
This makes it so that doctors can identify illnesses before the symptoms surface
DSM-IV
Inclusion criteria: if you HAVE these symptoms, you can be included in the diagnostic of the mental illness that youare talking about
Exclusion criteria: If you have these symptoms you can be excluded from the diagnostic of the mental illness that you are talking about.
All mental disorders are shaped by culture
Psychopathology - the field concerned with the nature, development, and treatment of mental disorders
very difficult to stay objective in this field
Stigma - the destructive beliefs and attitudesheld by a society that are ascribed to groups considered different in some manner, such as people with a mental illness
Four characteristics:
1. A label is applied to a group of people that distinguishes them from others (e.g crazy)
2. The label is linked to deviant or undesirable attributes by society (e.g crazy people are dangerous)
3. People with the label are seen as essentially differentfrom those without the label, contributing to an “us” versus “them” mentality
4. People with the label are discriminated against unfairly (e.g a clinic fpr crazy people can’t be built in our neighborhood)
Mental disorder: Definition in page 4 of chapter 1
DSM-IV-TR: Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, fourth edition, text revision
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Personal distress: A person’s behavior may be classified as disordered if it causes him or her great distress
Not all mental disorders cause distress (ex: an individual with antisocial personality disorder may treat others cold without experiencing anyguilt, remorse, anxiety, or other distress)
Not all behavior that causes distress is disordered (ex: the distress of hunger due to religious fasting or the pain of childbirth causes distress, but it is not disordered)
Disability: Impairment in some important area of life
Disability can also be used to characterize mental disorder (phobias can produce both distress and disability because for ex,fear of flying can prevent someone from taking a good job)
Disability alone cannot be used to define mental disorders because some, not all, disorders involve disabilities (like bulimia)
Violation of social norms: Widely held standards (beliefs and attitudes) that people use consciously or intuitively to make judgements about where behaviors are situated on such scales as good-bad, right-wrong,justified-unjustified, and acceptable-unacceptable.
Behavior that violates social norms might be classified as disordered
Social norms vary a great deal across cultures and ethnic groups, so behavior that clearly violates a social norm in one group may not do so at all in another
Dysfunction: An author (1992) proposed that mental disorders could be defined as harmful dysfunction
Two parts:...