Psychological Disorders

• Described as a harmful dysfunction in which behavior is judged to be atypical, disturbing, maladaptive, and unjustifiable
• Early Theories suggest that those afflicted were possessed by evil spirits

Medical Perspective: 

Psychological disorders are sicknesses and can be diagnosed, treated, and cured.

Biopsycho Social Perspective:

• Assumes biological psychological and sociocultural factors combine to interact, causing psychological disorders

I. Anxiety Disorders:

• A patient fears something awful will happen to them

• they are in a state of intense apprehension, uneasiness, uncertainty, or Fear

Phobias:

• A person experiences sudden episodes of intense dread
• must be an irrational fear

Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD):

• Person is continuously tense, apprehensive, and in a state of autonomic nervous system arousal
• The patient is constantly tense and worried, feels inadequate, is oversensitive, can't concentrate, and suffers from insomnia

Panic Disorder:

• Marked by minute-long episodes of intense dread in which the person experiences terror and accompanying chest pain, choking, and other frightening sensations

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD):

• Persistent unwanted thoughts (obsessions) cause someone to feel the need (Compusion) to engage in a particular fashion

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

• Memories of events cause anxiety
• Flashbacks/nightmares following a person's involvement in or observation of an extremely stressful event

II. Somatoform Disorders

• Occurs when a person manifests a psychological problem through a psychological symptom

Hypochondriasis

• Has frequent physical complaints for which medical doctors are unable to locate the cause

Conversion Disorder

• Report existence of sever psychological problems with no biological reason

III. Dissociative Disorders

• Disruption in the conscious process

Psychogenic Amnesia

• A person cannot remember things with no psychological basis for the disruption in memory

Dissociative Fugue

• People with psychogenic amnesia find themselves in an unfamiliar environment

Dissociative Identity Disorder

• Used to be known as multiple personality disorder 
• A person has sever rather than one integrated personality (usually 3)
• People with DID commonly have a history of childhood abuse or trauma

IV. Mood Disorders

Experience extreme or inappropriate emotion

Major Depression

• Unhappy for at least two weeks
• Depression is the common cold of psychological depression

Seasonal Affective Disorder

• Expreience depression during winter months
• Based on amount of sunlight
• Treated with light therapy

Bipolar Disorder

• Formally manic depression
• Involves periods of depression and manic episodes 
• Manic episodes involves feelings of high or low energy

V. Personality Disorders

• Well established, maladaptive ways of behaving that negatively affect people's ability to function 
• Dominates personality

Antisocial Personality Disorder

• Lack empathy
• Little regard for other's feelings
• View the world as hostile and look out only for themselves

Dependent Personality Disorder

• Rely too much on attention and help of others

Histrionic Personality Disorder

• Needs to be the center of attention

Narcissistic Personality Disorder

• Having unwarranted sense of self importance
• Thinking you re the center of the universe

VI. Schizophrenic Disorders

• Found in about 1 person out of every 100.

Symptoms:

• Disorganized thinking
• Disturbed Perceptions
• Inappropriate emotions & actions

Disorganized Thinking

• Bizarre, fragmented, distorted, or false beliefs
• Comes from a breakdown in selective attention- they cannot filter out information

Delusions

• Delusions of Persecution (Thinking someone is always after you)
• Delusions of Grandeur (" I am perfect; Deal with it)

Disturbed Perceptions

• Hallucinations- Sensory experiences without sensory stimulation

Inappropriate emotions/actions

• Laugh at inappropriate times
• Flat effect
• Senseless compulsive acts
• Catatonia- Motionless

Positive (+) Vs. Negative (-) Symptoms

• (+) Hallucination
• (+) Disorganized
• (+) Deluded in their talk (Word Salad)
• (+) Inappropriate tears/rage/laughter

• (-)Toneless voice
• (-)Expressionless face
• (-)Absence of appropriate thoughts
• (-)Mute
• (-)Very Rigid body

Types of Schizophrenia

Disorganized Schizophrenia

• Disorganized Speech/Behavior
• Flat/Inappropriate Emotion
• " Imagine the worst"
• Systematic, Sympathetic, Quiet, Pathetic, Apologetic

Paranoid Schizophrenia

• Preoccupied with delusions/hallucinations

"SOMEONE

                    IS        

                         OUT 

                                  TO 

                                        GET 

                                                 ME!!!!!!!
[Edit]

• when people lose grip of reality and believe that something is there but isn't.

Catatonic Schizophrenia

• Flat effect 
• Waxy flexibility
• Parrotlike repeating of another's speech or movements

Biomedical Therapiesfor psychological disorders

Psychoparmacology The study of the effects of drugs on mind and behavior

Antipsychotic drugs

• Are a class of medicines used to treat psychosis and other mental conditions
• If you have hallucinations, delusions, and agitations, you will be prescribed antipsychotic drugs
• These drugs often have powerful side effects

Antianxiety Drugs

• Includes drugs like Vallium and Librium
• Like alcohol, they depress the nervous system
• Most widely abused drug

Do they REALLY solve the problem?

Antidepressant drugs

• Lift you up out of depression 
• Most increase the neurotransmitter Norepinephrine 

Prozac, Paxil, zoloft

Work by blocking serotonin reuptake

Electroconvulsive Therapy

• Biomedical therapy for severely depressed patients in which brief electric currents are sent through the brain of an anesthetized patient
• can cause memory problems

Psychological Therapies for Psychological Disorders

Psychological Therapies

• Treatments based upon psychological principles

Biomedical Therapies

• Treatments that focus on altering the brain with drugs, psychosurgery, or electro-convulsive therapy

Therapy

• It used to be that if someone exhibited abnormal behavior, they were institutionalized.

• Because of new drugs, and better therapy, the U.S went to a policy of deinstitutionalization

I. Psychoanalytic Therapy

• Freud's therapy
• Freud used free association, hypnosis, and dream interpretation to gain insight into the client's unconscious
• Modern methods include one on one interaction using free association

II. Humanistic Therapy

• Focuses on people's potential for self fulfillment (Self actualization)
• Focuses on the present and future (not the past)
• Focuses on conscious thoughts (not unconscious)
• Take responsibility for your actions instead of blaming childhood anxieties
• Can be broken down into two therapies:

Group Therapy

• A.A Meetings
• Self-Help Support Groups
• Sex offender support groups etc.
• Friends and families
• Support systems

Client (person) Centered Therapy

• Most widely used humanistic therapy
• Therapists should use genuineness, acceptance, and empathy to show unconditional positive regard toward their clients
• Developed by Carl Rogers

III. Behavioral Therapies

• Therapy that applies learning principles to the elimination of unwanted behaviors
• Behaviors are the problems- so we must change behaviors

Systematic Desensitization

• A type of countercontitioning that associates a pleasant relaxed state with gradually increasing anxiety-triggering stimuli

Exposure Therapy

• Form of desensitization
• The client directly confronts the anxiety-provoking stimulus

Aversive Conditioning Therapy

• A type of counterconditioning that associates an unpleasant state with an unwanted behavior

Operant Conditioning

• Token Economy: An operant conditioning procedure that rewards a desired behavior
• A patient exchanges a token of some sort, earned for exhibiting the desired behavior, for various privileges or treats

IV. Cognitive Therapy

• A therapy that teaches people new, more adaptive ways of thinking and acting; based on the assumptions that thoughts intervene between events and our emotional reactions.

7 Perspectives of Psychology

The best way to characterize the different approaches that are taken to answer the question of psychology is to identify them as major perspectives. The major perspectives represent fundamental assumptions that underlie the research questions and methods that are used in order to answer the questions of psychology.

Biological

• The  interaction between anatomy (brain and nervous system) and behavior
• How the body and brain process emotions, memories, and sensory details
• What affects your body and behavior?
• Ex: Up all night texting; so exhausted

Behavioral

• Determined by your environment and experiences (not genetics) 
• Feelings do not matter; The mind and mental sentiments cannot be observed, therefore they do not matter
• Main Idea: Everything is trained and learned, nothing is born.
• Key people: Watson, Skinner, Pavlov.

Cognitive

• THINKING
• Key Person: Jean Pidget
• Importance of how our mind sees, professes and remembers information

Evolutionary

• Behavior can be best explained in terms of how adaptive behavior is key to our survival.
• We behave the way we do because we've inherited these behaviors
• Those behaviors must've helped ensure our ancestor's  survival.
• Key person: Charles Darwin
• Natural Selection:We have evolved into our present states over long periods of time

Humanistic

• Free will and potential for personal growth guide behavior and mental processes.
• The importance of love, acceptance, and feelings
• Views human nature as positive
• Focuses on how our environment influences our growth potential and need for love and acceptance
• Self Actualization:Process of fulfilling your potential
• Key people: Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers

SocioCultural 

• Most of your behavior and feelings are dictated by the culture you live in
• Must be taken into account when trying to understand, control, or predict behavior
• Ex: Some cultures kiss eachother when geeting, some bow, some shake hands.

PsychoAnalytical

• Interaction between the conscious and unconscious (mental processes that we do not normally have access to but are infuenced by) shape our behavior
• Ex: A man cannot form relationships with others because he was beaten as a child, causing fear of getting close to others

Intro into Psychology

Psychology

      The scientific study of behavior and mental processes

• Behavior-  Anything that can be observed
• Mental Processes- internal experiences such as thoughts, feelings, sensations, and perceptions
• Systematic study- Systematic collection and examination of data to support or disprove hypothesis rather than depending on common sense

Key Players in the History of Psychology

     Roots of Psychology can be traced back 2000 years ago to early philosophers, biologists, and psychologists of ancient Greece

Hippocrates

• Greek Psychologist that thought the mind or soul resided in the brain
• He believed that it was not composed of physical substance
• Dualism- Seeing the mind and body as two different things that interact

Plato  (350 B.C)

• A Greek philosopher that believed that who we are and what we know are innate

Aristotle

• Plato's student
• believed that who we are is acquired from experience
• Saw the mind and body as different aspects of the same thing

John Locke

• Believed that knowledge comes from observation and what we know comes from experience
• Coined the term " Tabula Rasa", meaning blank slate.
• Believes that the mind is a blank slate in which the environment writes upon

Rene Descartes

• Believed that what we know is innate
• " I think; therefore I am"

Nature Vs. Nurture

     The common debate whether our behavior is inborn or learned through experience

Nature -Ideas are innate to the human mind

Nurture - Anything we know is leaned through experiences

 "Men are made; not born"