Chapter 1 Flashcards
How do you determine when someone’s behaviour is abnormal?
- infrequency: rarely seen in the population
- personal distress: patient feels bad
- personal dysfunction: difficult to do things they need to do
- violation of norms: against what people think is appropriate
- diagnosis by an expert
Why do ideas about abnormality change over time?
what people think is unusual (values) is different at different times and places in history
How is eugenics related to the study of abnormal psychology?
eugenics is the practise of killing people or making it impossible for them to have babies so that their “bad” genes don’t go on, and governments, including in Canada, used to do that, including to people who might not actually have been insane
What are the weaknesses of the general criteria defining abnormality?
- “infrequency”: not all infrequent things are bad, e.g. being an inventor or athlete
- “personal distress”: not present for all mentally ill people, e.g. manic people, and also present in normal people, e.g. death of family member
- “personal dysfunction”: boundaries are not clear, e.g. boundary of “appropriate” functioning or what is “harmful”
- “violation of norms”: not all behaviours that violate norms are due to mental illnesses, e.g. criminals, and social norms are different depending on time and place
Why is it important to study the history of the concept of abnormality?
so that we can check whether our current ideas about mental illness are too harsh or cruel and that we are actually helping people
What is a clinical psychologist?
someone who was first trained in general psychology and then after received more training in diagnosing and treating psychological disorders
What is a psychological disorder?
a specific display of problems with functioning that meets criteria
Which manuals are most commonly used to diagnose psychological disorders?
- Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)
- International Classification of Mental and Behavioral Disorders (ICD-11)
What is the difference between psychological abnormality and mental illness?
they are both about behaviours that make functioning difficult, but “mental illness” implies that the cause is medical (in the structure of the body) rather than psychological
Describe some of the prehistoric views of psychological abnormality.
- trephination (cutting holes in skulls) 500,000 years ago
- Egyptians thought demons possessed people
- hunter-gatherer societies in Africa still chain people to trees
Name the important historical periods of development of the understanding of psychological abnormality.
- prehistory
- Greek and Roman
- Arab
- middle ages
- modern/scientific
What happened in the Middle Ages?
- this is called the “dark ages”, where the Roman and Greek knowledge about how to deal with mental illness was hidden from people
- mentally ill people were given exorcisms, tortured, or killed because people thought they had demons in them
Why is it difficult to define psychological abnormality?
- values change with time and between places
- there’s no exact criteria or way of deciding what is “normal” and not
What were the early biological approaches?
- heredity
- syndromes
- infection
- shock therapy
- psychopharmacology
What were the early psychological approaches?
- hypnotism
- psychoanalysis
- beahviourism
What is a syndrome?
group of symptoms that occur together
