Week 1 Introduction Flashcards
What do research studies in abnormal child psychology aim to address?
- What constitutes normal and abnormal behavior for children of different ages, sexes and ethnic and cultural backgrounds
- Identify causes and correlates of abnormal child behavior
- Make predictions about long-term outcomes
- Developing and evaluating methods for treatment and/or prevention
List 4 important features that distinguish most child and adolescent disorders (*)
When adults seek services for children, it’s often unclear whose problem it is. Other people refer them that’s why they are in the mental health system.
Many child and adolescent problems involve failure to show expected developmental progress
The problem may be transitory or perhaps an initial indication of more severe problems ahead
Determining the problem requires familiarity with normal and abnormal development
Many problem behaviours shown by children and youths are not entirely abnormal
To some extent, most children and youth commonly exhibit certain problem beharious, but some concerns seem to involve more than these normal concerns
Thus, decisions about what to do also require familiarity with known psychological disorders and troublesome problem behaviours
Interventions for children and adolescents often are intended to promote further development, rather than merely to restore a previous level of functioning
Unlike interventions for most adult disorders, the goal for many children is to boost their abilities and skills, as well as to eliminate distress.
What are some possible referral questions for a client below 1-year-old?
Look at physical development, gross motor development
Not so much intellectual development
What are some possible referral questions for a client in preschool?
Look for externalizing problems (it’s out there lol): Social and interpersonal development (e.g aggression), speech patterns, unable to follow instructions, separation anxiety
What are some possible referral questions for a client between 7-12 years old?
Self-esteem, ability to vocalize thoughts and feelings (more so for 12 y/o, 7 y/o not so much, but then again think about culture differences)
Academic stress (P1 - new school environment, P5/6 - PSLE), truancy, interpersonal issues
What are some possible referral questions for a teenage client?
More internalizing issues - Isolation, eating disorders, defiance/bad relationships with family/parents, depression, relationship problems
Early views of mental illness were more ______.
What does ______ mean in this case?
biological.
if you have a mental illness, something must be wrong somewhere in your body, so you have to eat medication to get better.
Intervention for children and adolescents often are intended to promote _________, rather than merely to restore a previous level of functioning.
further development.
aim to boost their abilities and skills and reduce distress
Give an example of an international law/organization that is aimed at protecting the rights of children.
UN Convention on the Rights of the Child
What policies have Singapore implemented so far when it comes to protecting the rights of children? (*)
Children and Young Persons Act
MSF - Child Protection Service to protect children from abuse
What has Singapore come up with to better facilitate the development of children with special educational needs? (*)
Come up with SPED schools + extra resources to see who goes to mainstream school or SPED school.
Mild LD goes to mainstream schools
Moderate and above go to SPED schools
Compulsory Education Act now covers children with moderate to severe special needs.
What are the amendments to CYPA and what are some possible reasons behind it? (*)
To better protect abused or neglected children, the age limit for what’s considered a young person has been raised from 16 to 18. This would allow the authorities to intervene in cases of abuse involving older children.
Enhanced Care and Protection Order (ECPO).
ECPO allows MSF and designated caregivers to children who are in out-of-home care to make day-to-day as well as more substantive decisions such as overseas travel - just as what parents would do in normal family settings,
BPC to Family Guidance Order. Don’t just place the blame on the child. Shifts focus on how to better support the family rather than how to punish the child.
In Western society, an inkling of the prerequisites for a social conscience first occurred during the _____, when both a philosophy of humane care and institutions of social protection began to take root.
17th century
What did John Locke propose?
Believed in individual rights, and expressed the novel opinion that children should be raised with thought and care instead of indifference and harsh treatment.
Rather than seeing children as uncivilized tyrants, he saw them as emotionally sensitive beings who should be treated with kindness and understanding and given proper educational opportunities
Who was the person with one of the first documented efforts to work with a special child?
What did this result in?
Jean-Marc Itard, 19th century.
Symbolically, this undertaking launched a new era of a helping orientation towards special children, which initially focused on the care and treatment, and training of the people then termed “mental defectives”.
What kind of distinction did Leta Hollingworth make between those with ID and those with mental disorders?
What came out of this distinction?
What still required work?
Argued that many mentally defective children were actually suffering from emotional and behavioral problems due to inept treatment by adults and lack of appropriate intellectual challenge
This view led to an important and basic distinction between people with ID and those with mental disorders, but basic means that it’s still not very clear
Local governments needed to know who was responsible for helping children whose cognitive development appeared normal but showed serious or emotional problems
Solutions were usually religious in nature → suffering from moral insanity → implications that he/she were having disturbances in personality or character.
What did Benjamin Rush propose about mental disorders in children?
Children were incapable of true adult-like insanity, because the immaturity of their developing brains prevented them from retaining the mental events that caused insanity
Consequently, the term moral insanity grew in acceptance as a means of accounting for non-intellectual forms of abnormal child behaviour
What was one major flaw with early attempts at creating biological explanations?
They were heavily biased in favor of the cause being the person’s fault.
How does masturbatory insanity illustrate this flaw?
E.g Masturbatory insanity → example illustrates how such thinking can lead to an explanation of abnormal behaviour without consideration of objective scientific findings and the base rate of masturbation in the general population
Also shows how prevailing political and social climates influence definitions of child psychopathology both today and in the past.
Views of masturbation evolved from the moral judgment that it was a sin of the flesh, to the medical opinion that it was harmful to one’s physical health, to the psychiatric assertion that sexual overindulgence caused insanity.
What was done to change this view, and who spearheaded it?
Clifford Beers.
Believed that mental disorders are a form of disease → criticized society’s ignorance and indifference and sought to prevent mental disease by raising the standards of care and disseminating reliable information
Thus, detection and intervention methods began to flourish, based on a relatively more tempered view of afflicted individuals (but still quite frightened and ill-informed la).
What was one limitation of Beers’ model?
Unfortunately, because this paradigm was based on a biological disease model, intervention was limited to persons with the most visible and prominent disorders (e.g psychoses and severe ID).
List two psychological attributions of abnormal behavior in children
- Psychodynamic Theory
2. Behaviorism
What did Freud propose about mental disorder in children?
Roots of disorders were traced back to early childhood.
He believed that individuals have inborn drives and predispositions that strongly affect their development, but he also believed that experiences play a role in psychopathology
List ways in which psychodynamic theory advanced our ways of thinking about the causes and treatment of mental disorders.
- First to give meaning to the concept of mental disorder by linking it to childhood experiences
- Incorporated developmental concepts into an understanding of psychopathology at a time when early childhood development was virtually ignored by mainstream child psychiatry and psychology
- Emphasis on the fact that personality and mental health outcomes had multiple causes (no singular specific cause)
