Abnormal Psychology: Mental health disorders

Abnormal Psychology

• It is the study of mental disorders' nature, causes, and treatments.

Physiological Disorder

• Psychological dysfunction within an individual is linked to distress or impaired functioning.
• The response is atypical or culturally unexpected.

DSM-5-TR

• It is a manual providing the standards for classifying disorders.

The 4Ds of Mental Health Disorder

• Distress: Exhibits unwarranted emotional dysregulation, or extreme mood.
• Dysfunction: Unable to function and perform activities.
• Deviance: Thinking and behaving outside norms.
• Danger: Potential harm to oneself or others.

Diagnosis

• Determines if an individual's problem meets the criteria for a psychological disorder, per the DSM-5-TR.

Two Strategies in Diagnosis

• Idiographic Analysis: Considers unique personality, cultural background, or circumstances.
• Nomothetic Analysis: Focuses on whether problems belong to the general population.

Goals of Diagnosis

• Treatment, not classification is the main goal.
• Syntonic symptoms jive with the ego.
• Dystonic symptoms are not acceptable to the ego.
• Prognosis evaluates prospect of recovery conditions.
• Prognosis is affected by the disorder's nature, post-hospital environment, and ego strength.
• Development of Insight: The willingness of the client to understand their condition.
• Understanding this helps the client move forward and make their own lives better

Historical Conceptions of Abnormal Behavior

• Explanations and control of problematic behavior are derived from popular theories or models

The Supernatural Tradition

• During the 14th century, authorities supported demon and witch superstitions.
• Magic and sorcery sought to solve bizarre behavior linked to the devil.
• Insanity was viewed as a natural response to mental or emotional stress.
• Common treatments included rest, sleep, and a healthy environment.

The Biological Tradition

• Hippocrates proposed treating psychological disorders like other diseases.
• He cited brain pathology, head trauma, and heredity as causes.
• He recognized psychological and interpersonal factors like family stress.
• Galen adopted Hippocrates' ideas, known as the Hippocratic-Galenic Approach.
• An imbalance among blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm results in dysfunction.
• John P. Grey advocated treating the mentally ill as physically ill.
• Treatment focused on rest, diet, ventilation, and proper room temperature.
• Greys's leadership improved hospital conditions, but overshadowed individual treatments.

The Psychological Tradition

• Psychosocial treatments attribute psychopathology to psychological, social, and cultural factors.
• Moral therapy treats institutionalized patients normally, reinforcing social interaction.
• It declined due to factors like overcrowding and acceptance of brain pathology.
• Psychoanalytic theory says continual battle to stay on top of the warring id and superego.
• The anxiety is a signal that alerts the ego to marshal unconscious protective processes.
• If the ego fails, psychological disorders develop due to intrapsychic conflicts.
• Cognitive-behavioral model: Combines insights from behavioral, cognitive, and social learning models.

Modern Scientific Approach to Psychopathology

• It uses tools and methodology.
• No single influence is biological, behavioral, cognitive, emotional, or social in isolation.

The Scientist-Practitioner

• Using this method helps describe disorders, determine cause, and produce new information.

Emotional Influences

• Current states can affect heart rate and respiration.

Social Influences

• The society's beliefs, actions, agenda, and support affect people's biology and behavior.

Developmental Influences

• People will be more or less reactive to a given situation.

The Diathesis-Stress Model

• Inherited tendencies can be activated under stress

Biological Factors: Neurotransmitter Abnormalities

• Neurons need to transmit nerve impulses effectively

Biological Factors: Impulse Travel

• Nerve impulses travel from the cell body down the axon to axon endings
• Communication between neurons occurs at the synapse.
• It's a tiny space between neurons where neurotransmitters are released.
• Neurotransmitters are chemical substances that enable interneuronal transmission.
• Neurotransmitter imbalances can cause abnormal behavior.

Types of Neurotransmitters Studied

• Norepinephrine: Serves emergency reactions, attention, and basic motives.
• Dopamine: Functions in pleasure, cognition, and implicated in schizophrenia.
• Serotonin: Affects information processing, behaviors, moods, anxiety, and depression, and suicidal disorders.
• Glutamate: Has implications in schizophrenia.
• Gamma Aminobutyric Acid (GABBA): Reduces anxiety and high arousal states.

Genetic Vulnerabilities

• Genes are DNA molecules carrying hereditary information.
• Genetic abnormalities can be linked to defects or disorders.
• A genetically vulnerable person inherits gene polymorphisms, increasing vulnerability.
• It can lead to structural or chemical abnormalities in the nervous system.

Genes

• Behaviour affect behavior INDIRECTLY
• Are turned on or off based behavior with the environment.
• The environment, like stress, plays a role in gene expression.

Temperament

• A child's reactivity and ways of self-regulation.
• It is influenced by genetics and prenatal/postnatal factors.
• Fearfullness causes the child to avoid fearul situations.
• Children with high levels of positive affect and activity are more likely to show high levels of mastery motivation.

Brain Dysfunction and Neuroplasticity

• Neural plasticity: Brain's flexibility to change in response to experiences, stress, diet, and disease.
• Normal rearing conditions with caring parents are perfectly adequate.
• There are changes to the amount of brain tissue through being in a positive environmental state or negative one.

The Psychological Viewpoints: Freud's Psychoanalytic Theory

• The unconsious is hurtful memories, forbidden desires, and other experiences.
• Anxiety can be overtly experienced or repressed.

Ego-Defense Mechanisms

• The ego may use irrational protective measures

The Interpersonal Perspective

• Alfred Adler believed that people are inherently social beings motivated primarily by the desire to belong to and participate in a group.

Attachment Theory

• John Bowlby's theory emphasizes the importance of early experience, especially early experience with attachment relationships, as laying the foundation for later functioning throughout childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.

Quality of parental care

• Can be beneficial or detrimental

Anxiety Disorders: Anxiety and Fear

• Anxiety is future-oriented, with physical tension and apprehension.
• Fear is an immediate reaction to danger, triggering fight or flight.
• Panic attacks are a abrupt discomfort accompanied by short breath and dizziness.

Comorbidity with Physical Disorder

• Anxiety unique increases in suicidal ideation.

Separation Anxiety Disorder

• Children worry about something happening to loved ones or themselves.
• Children may refuse to go to school due to fear of separation.
• The separation from attachment figures causes anxiety/fear.

DSM-5-TR Criteria for Separation Anxiety Disorder

• Excessive distress about separation.
• Worry about losing figures or harm to them.
• Fear of events causing separation (e.g., kidnapping).
• Refusal to leave home or sleep alone.
• Nightmares about separation.
• Physical symptoms during separation.
• Symptoms last four weeks in children and six months in adults, causing distress.
• Not better explained by another disorder.

Selective Mutism

• Children's lack of speech in settings where speaking is expected.
• Not due to lack of knowledge or physical difficulties, but social anxiety-driven.
• Behaviour does not occur due to a lack of knowledge of speech or any physical difficulties.

DSM-5-TR Criteria for Selective Mutism

• Consistent failure to speak in specific social situations.
• Interferes with education/occupation/social communication; lasts at least one month.
• Not due to communication disorder/exclusivity during other disorders.

Specific Phobias

• irrational fear of a situation.
• Individual greatly fears something perceived as dangerous.
• For a phobia to occur, a traumatic conditioning experience occurs.

DSM-5-TR Criteria for Specific Phobia

• Fear/anxiety about a specific object/situation.
• The phobic object almost always provokes immediate fear.
• Object is actively avoided or endured with intense fear.
• Fear is disproportionate and persistent (6+ months), causing distress.
• Not better explained by another mental disorder.

Social Anxiety Disorder

• Fear of being scrutinized.
• Varies depending on the culture of others.
• Individuals often overestimate the negative consequences of social situations.

DSM-5-TR Criteria for Social Anxiety Disorder

• Intense fear or scrutiny.
• Fear of negative evaluation.
• Social situations almost always provoke fear.
• Fear is disproportionate and persistent (6+ months).
• Not due to substance/medical condition; not better explained by another disorder.

Panic Disorder

• A person must experience unexpected panic attacks and anxiety.
• Thinks it is a sign of death and irrationality.

Nocturnal Panic

• Panic attacks occur during sleep from "letting go" sensations
• Different from nightmares (different sleep stage)

DSM-5-TR Criteria for Panic Disorder

• Recurrent, unexpected panic attacks.
• Four+ symptoms such as palpitations, sweating, trembling, and the fear of dying.
• One attack followed by a month of concern/ maladaptive behavior.
• Disturbance is not about to a substance or another medical condition.

Agoraphobia

• Situations in which a person feels unsafe or unable to escape.
• People with agoraphobia always plan for rapid espcape.
• Panic disorder is accompanied or not, either way it can independently exist.
• MUST not occur exclusively to a specific disorder or coping mechanism for other disorders.

DSM-5-TR Criteria for Agoraphobia

• Marked fear of multiple situations: public transport, open spaces, enclosed places, crowds, outside home alone.
• Fears that escape is difficult if panic-like symptoms/incapacitating events occur.
• Agoraphobic situations provoke fear.
• Situations avoided or require presence of a companion.
• Fear/anxiety is disproportionate and persistent(6+ months), causing distress.
• Not better explained by another mental disorder.

Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD)

• Main focus is events of the everyday.
• Worrying about anything.
• Muscle tension, fatigue, irritability.
• Events become the focus of anxiety and worry.
• Majority causes onset to be adulthood.

DSM-5-TR’S CRITERIA FOR GENERALIZED ANXIETY DISORDER

• Excessive expectation (6+ months) due to an event or performance related anxiety.
• Muscle tension, fatigue
• Finding it difficult to control worry symptoms.
• Associated with a substance by the individual.

Trauma- and Stressor-Related Disorders

• A traumatic event causes exhibit symptoms under stress disorders.
• One need not be a direct victim.
• Trauma and stressor disorders are rage, horror, guilt and shame,
• Victims have primary 1st direct exposure, 2nd relative, 3rd occupation and traumatic events, 4th is the impact area related to trauma.
• The individual may go through shock, before contemplating intervention.

Attachment disorder

• Child will rarely seek caregiver responses.
• Child rearing practices have limited abusive affects on disorder and the neglect.

Disinhibited

• Social engagement will lead to disturbances of social.

DSM-5-TR’S CRITERIA FOR REACTIVE-ATTACHMENT DISORDER

• The child will rarely seek distress in some individuals.

Alterations in the Mood

• Cognition consists to a negative state
• Depersonalising is a perspective of the self.

Altered States

• Derealization has distorted and surreal conditions.

Adjustment Disorders

• Individuals are depressed with reactions to life stress.
• Have a hard time resuming their lives.

DSM-5-TR’S CRITERIA FOR ADJUSTMENT DISORDERS

• Develop reactions and a 3 month stress-o reactions
• Exhibit more impairment of social and external elements.
• Maladaptive reactions have the specifier of the adjustment disorder.
• Have acute and persistent elements for less than 6 months.
• Once the stressor has subsided it terminates.
• A type specifier can be used to indicate the cause of the symptom.