Understanding Abnormal Behaviour

Abnormal Behaviour:

• It lacks a clear and universally accepted definition, needing consideration of all dimensions.
• Statistical rarity involves possessing a rare characteristic that deviates significantly from the norm. Example: Genius on an IQ scale.
• Deviance or Norm Violation implies socially unacceptable behavior. Example: Genius-level IQ, while a Statistical rarity, is not considered deviant
• Norm-violating behaviors encompass a range, from harmless eccentricities to severe crimes.
• Using norm violations as the sole measure can be dangerous, potentially suppressing non-conformist behaviors.
• Distress: Self-distress: refers to subjective feelings of suffering and the extent of disturbance of feelings. Observer-distress is a situation when disturbance of behaviours/actions are observed.
• This allows self-definition of behaviors as abnormal, and not society at large.
• Dangers involve and include self-diagnosing or starving themselves for personal choice reasons.
• Dysfunction: The symptom causes clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other key areas.
• Maladaptive criteria includes impracticalities where there are individual circumstances.
• Clinical judgment involves a careful clinical history and concise summary of social, psychological, and biological factors.
• Clinical training is needed for recognition of psychopathological conditions.

Pros and Cons of Diagnosing

• Advantages can improve communication and understanding among health professionals, help researchers and therapists communicate about suspected causes and the most effective treatments and help communicate with other institutions in society like govt, insurance companies, legal matters.
• Disadvantages include the use of labels leading to their reification.
• Be aware of using labels as it gives an illusion of explanation, leading to an ill-informed meaning.

Key Concepts

• Mental health: A state of emotional and social wellbeing.
• Mental health difficulties: A wide range of emotional and behavioral abnormalities impacting lives.
• Psychopathology: Problematic patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior.
• Mental Disorder: A diagnosable set of symptoms and actions that are significantly from the norm
• It involves a combination of facts with personal values.

DSM-5 Definition

• Mental disorder: A syndrome characterized by clinically significant disturbance in cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior, reflecting dysfunction in psychological, biological, or developmental processes
• It is often associated with distress or disability in social, occupational, or key activities.
• It is not an expected or normalized response to stressors like loss. Socially unacceptable behavior, or internal conflict is not disorders, unless the deviance results from individual dysfunction.

Diagnostic Tools

• Diagnostic & Statistical Manual (DSM-5) & International Classification of Diseases(ICD-11)
• Structured, semi-structured, and unstructured clinical interviews.
• Assessment Tools: IQ tests, personality tests, Neuropsychological & Behavioral Assessment.
• Important to avoid overburdening an individual during diagnosis

Biological Perspective

• Before psychoanalysis, mental illness equaled insanity.
• "Insanity" was once viewed as one illness progressing in severity.
• Psychiatric classification was, and still is, aimed at describing disorders that includes common causes and similar treatments.
• Electroconvulsive therapy: Introduced in 1938, used for severe depression when conventional ways fail and its action on the brain remains unknown.
• Psychosurgery: Calming effects, and discontinued with the emergence of cheaper, less invasive solutions
• Contemporary areas include structural brain abnormalities & neurochemical imbalances.
• Key contributors/etiologies are genetic make-up or trauma.
• Primary developments include the production of psycho-pharmacological therapies.

Psychological Perspective

• Psychoanalysis: (Sigmund Freud) Theory explaining normal and abnormal human function & alleviation through techniques
• Psychoanalysis was applied to neurotic state, for example GAD, rather than just severe psychotic symptoms.
• Psychoanalysis key concepts include the unconscious state and the interactions of the conscious self, primitive Id & the Super Ego(moral self that opposes the primitive self) in the constant state of conflict that creates behavior

Additional Points Regarding Psychological Perspective

:

• Defense Mechanisms (Repression, Denial & Projection): are actions the self performs to conceal unwanted thoughts or urges.
• Defense Action: Actions are to disguise or alter unwanted internal feeling for significant feelings, while the self itself is also injured in capabilities
• Neuroses: Actions include the distress in the ability to function
• Psychoses: Severe examples are Hallucinations, where the ego copes with pain through withdrawal from reality.

Distinction Between Models

• No distinctions are qualitatively different between normal and mental state(psychoanalytical)
• A one degree model vs a Qualitative difference within certain situations. The qualitative difference also serves to hide underlying conscious reality.

Psychoanalytical Perspective Treatment

• Variety of treatments exists to reduce the ability of the self to maintain internal conflict. Treatments include Dream Analysis to remove unconscious Id impulses and Free association by encouraging insight in the unconscious for all
• Transference: occurs when patients move anger from earlier time/situations in life. These help to uncover themes from said relationships.
• Treatment Goals are not definitive to symptoms as lines blurred.

Psychodynamic Theories

• Depart from original ideas but upholding the concept of self's development and ego.

Object Relations

• Human and relationship factors are important.
• Limitations of the psychological and strengths are a medical model with different approaches.
• Boundaries of a mental state are difficult to measure on testing and measurement, it can cause over-diagnosis.

Behavioural Perspective

• This perspective, developed by John B. Watson, stated how the study of actions should be an objective and experimental science.
• It can be described through Unconditioned responses, such responses are elicited to stimuli & with certain stimuli a similar conditioned response will occur and develop.

Operant Conditioning

• Satisfactory rewards increase that action which was followed by the reward. The avoidance and decrease of activity can occur if followed by Punishment
• Positive stimulus reinforcement increases behavior, while negative stimulus does the same to remove negative traits.
• Traditional behaviour is critical, as the diagnostic category implies a medical model and different states.

Goal for a behaviorist perspective

• Under behavioralism the goal is how all action is understood in a context for rewards and avoidance.
• There is support in supporting adaptability and extinctions of behaviors for stimuli.

Modern Behavioral Perspectives

• Learning theories developed to incorporate mental/cognitive/intellectual actions, rather than by external control.
• Actions are precise, measurable to quantify for science(unlike psychodynamic)
• Criticisms include how behaviors show oversimplified understanding of mankind.

Cognitive Perspective

• Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck are the leading theorists for the cognitive perspective, as those cognitive processes cause disturbances;
• (Ellis)Developed Rational action-EMOTIVE therapy to show that people develop events, not simply by responding but interpretations. Actions depend on one's meaning of events.
• (Beck)Thought patterns emerging and the thoughts are connected to specific patterns to interpret the events.
• Negative patterns in actions that occur as well

Research goals for cognitive perspective

• Research is to discover how people perceive and remember aspects of the inner world. And selectively regard what is distracted.
• The manner for that selection causes psychological process distortions.

Cognitive Perspective Treatment

• Allows individuals to show/discover new associations between thoughts to actions
• Treatment includes cognitive restructuring
• This involves a client working with a therapist to challenge the inner thoughts and their actions

Behaviour - Cognitive Perspective

• Techniques are used together because of its compatibility with cognitive & scientific model of clinical psychology
• They are combined so it's measurable so goals are attained & the causes are determined by recent findings.

Humanistic Perspective

• Disagrees with negative deterministic ideas and aims to explore ideas, like self, hope, creativity. The key element of it is the tendency for humans to value people and have their talents known.
• Actualization is attained with the experiences that provide/generate + actions.

Treatment in Humanistic treatment

• is to reverse a pathological process to provide someone whom needs to have their actions self actualized, even with the actions are with one's feelings, goals, and needs.

Biopsychosocial Approach

• This involves areas that overlap & initially shifted to biological causes then Psychological causes.
• Biological
• Involve epigenetics, genetic vulnerabilities where treatment is biological driven. -This is psychological and involves interconnecting thoughts with behaviors
• This model is influenced by someone's development;

Treatment

-is informed on the targets & could be biological or social factors.

The Transdiagnostic Model

involves actions & certain mental models related to the emotion or perception Dysregulation