Schizophrenia and bipolar

Mayra Miranda
Psychology 101
Page 1
Conduct disorder in adults, such as alcoholism, depression, anxiety, schizophrenia and bipolar disorders have serious personal and social consequences. May beassociated with anxiety, impaired occupational and educational functioning, absenteeism, financial problems, child abuse and neglect, medical problems and physical ill health, high healthcare costs inmedical and mental health, impaired social functioning and self -care, high demand for behavioral services, frequent hospitalization, and conflict, anxiety, marital dissolution and family violence(American Psychiatric Association, 1994; Hersen and Bellack, 2000). The prevalence rates for some of the behavioral disorders in adults are of 2-12% for major depressive disorder, 14% for alcoholdependence and abuse and 3-13% for various anxiety disorders (American Psychiatric Association, 1994). These data indicate that hundreds of millions of adults worldwide suffer from mental illness at somepoint in their lives.

Due to the deterioration and distress associated with these behavioral disorders have been conducted in the past 20 years hundreds of controlled research studies aimed atdeveloping effective treatments. These studies have targeted treatments several sets of presumed causal factors that underlie behavioral disorders: (a) biological mechanisms (production and reuptake ofneurotransmitters, genetics, brain activity and structure), (b) cognition (by such attributions, beliefs, automatic thoughts), (c) socio-behavioral factors (eg, responses of family and healthprofessionals, and contexts, stressors and environmental events), and (d) learning (reinforcement patterns, conditioned emotional responses).

For many behavioral disorders, controlled studies have led toimproved treatment outcomes when they are based on biological models, cognitive and psychosocial factors (for reviews of treatment outcomes, see Arnow and Constantino, 2003; Berglund, Thelander and...