What is a psychological disorder ?
a psychological dysfunction within an individual associated with distress or impairment in functioning and a response that is not typical or culturally expected.
What is a social constructivist ?
learning is collaborative - it’s built upon another’s contribution, and people build constructs and agree upon them
What are the negative implication for someone deciding you’re not normal ?
- Excluding people unfairly
- Not taking into account context
- Stigmitizating and removing autonomy
- Indirectly indicting power over the individual
- Limits how the person can navigate the world
- not have a job or lose one
What are the proposals for abnormal ?
- Conformity to norms
- Distress
- Functioning
What is involved for comformity to norms ?
- Abnormality = statistical infrequency or violation of social norms
- cut off points are quantitative and striaghtforward
- Intuitive: we beleive we know it when we see it
- Construct
- Stats - can be used to state something is outside the world
- two kinds of opinions - media
What is involved in distress ?
- Makes sense as highly funtional people may be struggling significantly inside
- An individuals internal world is used to protect themselves (e.x: antisocial personality disorder)
What is involved in functioning/dysfuntion ?
- Must create: interpersonal or occupational functioning
- Requires little inference
What is a psychological dysfuntion ?
cognitive, behavioural or emotional breakdown in functioning
How do we know it is dysfunctional ?
- Rarity
- Frequency
- Presentation
What was Wakefields “harmful dysfuntion” idea ?
- Failing to act in a adaptive way = dysfunctional
- Inability to survive = dysfunctional
What is presenting problem ?
Why the patient is seeking help
What is prevelance ?
How many people have the disorder
What is incidence ?
How many new cases occur within a period
What is sex ratio ?
proportion of males and females with a particular disorder
What is age of onset ?
at what age a disorder typically presents
What is course ?
the pattern of symptoms across time
What is prognosis ?
anticipated course of the disorder
What is etiology ?
Why a disorder begins
How was mental illness seen early on ?
- no outward signs of injury or illness -strange or bizarre behaviour with no visible cause
- said to be caused by supernatural causes
- “Treated” by trephination or by ceremonies by the Early Greeks
- Primitive cultures had supernatural etiologic models
What is trephination ?
cutting holes in the skull to let evil spirits out
How was mental illness seen in the Middle Ages ?
- Feared - scared of strange behaviour and sacred that they could contract the behaviour
- Christians - believed that God and the Devil were fighting over the individuals soul and that the person was possessed and believed they were witches
- Treatment - blood-letting, immersion in freezing water, and starvation; put to death , chaining on walls
What is involved in the advent of moral treatment ?
- Witch hunts
- Secondary to prisons
- Bedlam
- 18th century saw activism/reform
- Pinel
- Tuke
- Dorothea Dix
What were the biological causes believed to be ?
- Hippocrates - believed psychological disorders probably occurred in the brain
- Humoral theory: brain functioning affected by four fluids in body
- psychosomatic causes of medical illness without apparent physical causes
What were biological treatments ?
- Late 1800’s: put into hospitals since it was unsure what causes them so didn’t treat them
- 1920’s: Serendipitous drug discoveries, boom in prescriptions
- 1950’s: Some of the effective drugs we have today emerge
