Psychology: Unit 1-Psychological Disorders and Therapies

Psychological Disorder: A "harmful dysfunction" in which behavior is judges to be atypical, disturbing, maladaptive, and unjustifiable.

Current Perspective:

• Medical Perspective: psychological disorders are sickness and can be diagnosed, treated and cured. 
• Bio-Psycho-Social Perspective: Assumes biological, psychological and socio-cultural factors combine to interact causing psychological disorders,
• Used to be called Diathesis-Stress Model: diathesis meaning disposition and stress meaning environment. 

Classifying Psychological Disorders

• DSM-IV: Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders--the big book of disorders.
• Neurotic disorders: Distressing but one can still function in society and act rationally. 
• Psychotic Disorders: Person loses contact with reality, experiences distorted perceptions. 

Anxiety Disorders

Anxiety Disorders: A group of conditions where the primary symptoms are anxiety or defenses against anxiety.

• The patient fears something awful will happen to them.
• They are in a state on intense apprehension, uneasiness uncertainty, and fear. 

Phobias: A person experiences sudden episodes of intense dread

• Must be an irrational fear.

Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD): An anxiety disorder in which a persons continuously tense, apprehensive and in a state of autonomic nervous system arousal.

• The patient is constantly tense and worries, feels inadequate, is oversensitive, cant concentrate and suffers from insomnia.

Panic Disorder: An anxiety disorder marked by a minute-long episode of intense-dread in which a person experiences terror and accompanying chest pain, choking and other frightening sensations.

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: persistent unwanted thoughts (obsessions) cause someone to feel the need (compulsion) to engage in a particular action. 

• Obsession about dirt and germs may lead to compulsive hand washing.  

Post traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD): Flashbacks or nightmares following a person's involvement in or observation of an extremely stressful event.

• Memories of the vent cause anxiety.

Somatoform Disorders: Occurs when a person manifests a psychological problem through a physiological symptom. 

Hypochondriasis: Has frequent physical complaints for which medical doctors are unable to locate the cause.

• They usually believe that the minor issues (headache, upset stomach) are indicating a more sever illness. 

Conversion Disorder: report the existence of severe physical problems with no biological reason. 

• Like blindness or paralysis. 

Schizophrenia Disorders: About 1 in every 100 people are are diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Symptoms of Schizophrenia:

1. Disorganized Thinking
2. Disturbed Perceptions 
3. Inappropriate emotions and actions 

Disorganized Thinking: The thinking of a person with Schizophrenia is fragmented and bizarre and distorted with false beliefs. It comes from a breakdown in selective attention-they cannot filter out information.

Delusions: False beliefs

• Delusions of Persecution and Delusions of Grandeur
• Disturbed Perceptions
• Hallucinations: Sensory experiences without sensory stimulation.
• Inappropriate emotions and actions
• Laugh at inappropriate times
• Flat effect 
• Senseless, compulsive acts
• Catatonia-motionless

Positive vs. Negative Symptoms

• Positive Symptoms
1. Hallucinations
2. Disorganized
3. Deluded in their talk (word salad)
4. Inappropriate laughter, tears, or rage
• Negative Symptoms
1. Toneless Voice
2. Expressionless Face
3. Mute
4. Very rigid body
5. Absence of inappropriate symptoms

Types of Schizophrenia

• Disorganized Schizophrenia
• Disorganized speech or behavior, or flat or inappropriate emotion
• Clang associations
• Imagine the worst systematic, sympathetic, quite pathetic.
• Paranoid Schizophrenia
• Preoccupation with delusions or hallucinations
• "Somebody is out to get me."
• Catatonic Schizophrenia
• Flat effect
• Waxy Flexibility
• Parrot like repeating of another's speech and movements
• Undifferentiated Schizophrenia
• Many and varied symptoms

Psychological Therapies

Psychological Therapy: Treatments based on psychological principles

Bio-medical Therapy: Treatment that focus on altering the brain with drugs, psycho-surgery, or electro-convulsive therapy.

• It used to be that if someone exhibited abnormal behavior, they were institutionalized.
• Because of new drugs and better therapy, the US went to a policy of de-institutionalization. 

Psychoanalysis: 

• Freud's therapy
• Freud used free association, hypnosis and dream interpretation to gain insight into the client's unconscious. 

Humanistic Therapy: Focuses on people's potential for self-fulfillment (self-educate)

• Focus on the present and future
• Focus on conscious thoughts
• Take responsibility for your actions-instead of blaming childhood anxieties. 

Group Therapy

Self-Help Support Group: NA, sex offenders

Client (person) Centered Therapy: 

• Developed by Carl Rogers
• Therapists should use genuineness, acceptance, and empathy to show unconditional positive regard toward their clients. 

Behavior Therapy: Therapies that apples learning principles to the elimination of unwanted behaviors. The behaviors re the problems-so we must change the behaviors. 

Systematic Desensitization: A type of counter-conditioning that associate a pleasant related state with gradually increasing anxiety-triggering stimuli. 

Exposure Therapy: A form of desensitization where the client directly confronts the anxiety provoking stimulus. 

Aversive Therapy/Conditioning: A type of counter-conditioning that associates an unpleasant state with an unwanted behavior.

Token Economy: An operant conditioning procedure that rewards a desired behavior. 

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

The Bio-medical Therapies

Psycho-pharmacology: The study of the effects of drugs on mind and behavior.

Anti-psychotic drugs: 

• A class of medicine used to treat psychosis and other mental and emotional conditions. 
• These drugs are beginning to help schizophrenia with both positive and negative symptoms. 
• These drugs (Thorazine) often have powerful side effects.

Anti-anxiety drugs: 

• Includes drugs like Valium and Librium
• Like alcohol, they depress nervous system activity
• Most widely abused drug.  

Anti-depressant drugs:

• Lift you up out of depression
• Most increase neurotransmitter nor-epinephrine

Prozac, Pax, Zolaft: Work by blocking serotonin re-uptake

Electroconvulosive Therapy: Bio-medical Therapy for severely depressed patients in which brief electric current is sent through the brain of an anesthetized patient.