Abnormal Behavior
Nature of Insanity
- Exhibiting unusual behavior
- Designation
- Depends on culture, times, and situation
- Establish criteria for determining if people have a mental illness
- Deviance
- Abnormal behavior deviates from the behavior of the “typical” person
- Qualitatively abnormal behavior
- Deviates from culturally accepted standards
- Quantitatively abnormal behavior
- Deviates from a statistical average
- The context in which the disordered behavior occurs needs to be considered
- Maladaptive behavior
- A behavior that seriously disrupts your social, academic, or vocational
life
- Often seen as one of the diagnostic criteria for determining if someone
has a psychological disorder
- Personal distress
- The subjective feeling of anxiety, depression, or another unpleasant
emotion
- Continuum of sanity
- Psychological health and sanity is not always obvious
- Continuum between sanity and insanity
- Subjectivity in determining of someone suffers from a psychological disorder
Medical model
- Proposes that it is useful to think of abnormal behavior as a disease
- Has “driven” the field of research into psychological disorders
- Psychiatrists follow the medical model of mental illness
- Medical model of mental illness started appearing in the 1800’s
- Great improvement over the previous conceptions of mental illness
- Possession by demons
Biopsychosocial model
- Contends that ALL behavior arises from a complex interaction of nature
and nurture
- Genetic and physiological factors
- Past and present experiences
- Emphasizes interaction between a person's vulnerability and environmental
factors
- Cultural differences
- All cultures have stressors
- Reaction to stressors differs from culture to culture
DSM Multiaxial system
- Each person evaluated on five different dimensions of functioning known
as axis
- Axis 1
- Diagnosis of clinical syndromes
- Axis 2
- Diagnosis of long lasting syndromes
- Personality disorders
- May occur in conjunction with Axis 1 disorders
- Long-standing
- Maladaptive
- Inflexible
- Involve impaired functioning or subjective distress
- Axis 3
- Physical disorders or conditions
- Axis 4
- For reporting psychosocial and environmental problems that may affect
diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis of mental disorders
- Axis 5
- A scale for assessing how well an individual is functioning at the present
time
- Range
- 100 to 10
- Superior functioning in a wide range of activities to persistent danger
of severely hurting self or others
- Benefits of DSM system
- Facilitates diagnosis
- Aids in treatment
- Communication with others
- Problems with DSM system
- Diversity in members possessing disorder
- Leads to heterogeneity in the populations making up each category
- Makes it more difficult to generalize treatment and prognosis
- Diagnostic categories work best for the most typical members
Anxiety disorder
Anxiety: a feeling of apprehension accompanied by sympathetic nervous system
arousal
- Usually a normal and adaptive part of our lives
- Warns us of potential threats
- Disabling
- When people are unexplainably and uncontrollably tense
- When suffer inexplicable attacks of anxiety or panic
- When irrationally fearful of something
- When troubled by repetitive thoughts and/or actions
- 10%-15% of population suffers or has suffered from an anxiety disorder
- Marked by distressing, persistent anxiety or maladaptive behaviors that
reduce anxiety
- Generalized anxiety disorder
- A constant state of anxiety that exists independently of any particularly
stressful situation
- Central features
- Worry
- Continually tense and jittery
- Experience all physical symptoms of autonomic nervous system arousal
- Person can't identify and can't avoid the cause of persistent unpleasant
symptoms
- About 5% of the population suffers from disorder at some time in their
lives
- More common among women than men
- Panic disorder
- Characterized by recurrent attacks of overwhelming anxiety
- Usually occur suddenly and unexpectedly
- Attacks have sudden onset
- Builds to a peak rapidly
- Often accompanied by a sense of immanent danger or impending doom, and
an urge to escape
- Attacks very distressing
- About 1.5% of Americans experience panic disorder
- Can lead to agoraphobia
Agoraphobia: A fear of going out to public places
- Phobic disorder
- Marked by a persistent and irrational fear of an object or a situation
that presents no realistic danger
- A common psychological disorder that people often accept and live with
- Social phobia
- An intense fear of being scrutinized by others
- Avoid potentially embarrassing social situations
- Learning
- Pairing of an unpleasant experience with a situation or an object
- Avoiding or escaping the feared situation reduces anxiety
- Reinforces and continues phobic behavior
- Observation
- Learn to fear something by observing others
- Obsessive-compulsive disorder
- Result from anxiety and the behaviors are engaged in to relieve anxiety
- Persistent, uncontrollable intrusions of unwanted thoughts
- Urges to engage in senseless rituals
- Those afflicted realize thoughts and obsessions are out of control
- Obsessions
- Thoughts that repeatedly intrude on consciousness in a distressing way
- Take the form of repeated thoughts
- Attempt to ignore or suppress or neutralize such thoughts by engaging
in another thought or some action
- Compulsions
- Actions that one feels forced to carry out
- Stereotyped rituals that temporarily relieve anxiety
- Common
- Checking
- Cleaning
- Less common
- Counting
- Hoarding
- Occurs in 2%-4% of the population
- Appears in late teens and early twenties
Dissociative disorders
- Involves a disruption in the usually integrated functions of consciousness,
memory, identity, or perception of the environment
- Dissociative amnesia
- Involves a sudden loss of memory for important personal information
- Too extensive to be due to normal forgetting
- Might occur for a single traumatic episode
- Might occur for an extended period of time surrounding the event
- May resolve itself spontaneously
- May resolve itself gradually
- Dissociative identity disorder
- More commonly known as multiple-personality disorder
- Involves the coexistence in one person of two or more largely complete
and usually very different, personalities
- Alternate personalities
- Often display personality traits quite foreign to those of the “original”
personality
- Original personality is often unaware of the alternate personalities
- Usually have varying degrees of awareness of each other.
- Counseling
- Go to explain the gaps in their life and their awareness
- Need to determine how disorder is manifested
- Validity of disorder
- Number of reported cases increasing in last 30 years
- Reasons
- Most multiple personality cases are highly hypnotizable
- Implications
- Processes similar to hypnotism are involved in disorder
- Hypnotist suggests the disorder to very suggestible clients
- Possible causes
- Psychoanalysts
- Defense against anxiety caused by eruption of unacceptable impulses
- Learning theorists
- Behaviors reinforced by anxiety reduction
- Post traumatic disorders
- A natural protective response against histories of childhood trauma
Mood disorders
- Marked by emotional disturbances of various kinds that may spill over
to disrupt physical, perceptual, social, and thought processes
- Unipolar disorders
- Experience emotional extremes at just one end of emotional spectrum
- Bipolar disorders
- Experience emotional extremes at both ends of the continuum
- Depressive disorder
- Unipolar disorder
- Marked by persistent feelings of sadness and despair and a loss of interest
in previous sources of pleasure
- Can occur at any point in the life span
- Fairly common
- 7% of the population
- Cognitive explanation
- Depressed individuals possess depressive schemata
- Causes them to think of themselves, their current situation, and their
future possibilities in negative terms
- Ambiguous situations
- Interpret negatively
- Memory
- Remember negative event
- Attribution
- Internal attributions
- Adaptive explanation
- Causes an individual to slow down and to think about and reassess their
lives when they are being threatened
- Slows us down
- Avoids attracting predators
- Evokes support from others
- Bipolar mood disorder
- Mania: A euphoric, hyperactive, wildly optimistic state
- Alternate between depression and mania
- Characteristics of mania
- Optimism
- Little need for sleep
- Excess of energy
- Often a pleasurable state
- Consequences can be severe
- Occurs in about 1% of the population
- Affects men and women equally
- Appears to be more biological in origin
- Usually effectively treated by a regime of lithium
Schizophrenic disorders
- Marked by disturbances in thought that spill over to affect perceptual,
social, and emotional processes
- 1% - 1.5% of the population suffer from disorder
- Debilitating disease
- Diagnosis requires exhibiting signs of the disorder for at least 6 months
- Diagnosis requires exhibiting symptoms to a large degree for the better
part of at least 1 month
- Positive symptoms
- Appear to reflect an excess or distortion of normal cognitive functions
- Delusions
- Erroneous beliefs that usually involve a misinterpretation of perceptions
or experiences
- Maintained even though they are clearly out of touch with reality
- Hallucinations
- Sensory perceptions that occur in the absence of a real, external stimulus
or are gross distortions of perceptual input
- May occur in any sensory modality
- Usually experienced as voices that are perceived as being distinct from
the person's own thoughts
- Content varies
- Disorganized speech
- May “slip off the track” from one topic to another
- Answers to questions may be obliquely or completely unrelated
- Speech may be so disorganized that it is nearly incomprehensible
- Reflect breakdown in selective attention
- Grossly disorganized or catatonic behavior
- Disorganized behavior
- Manifest itself in several ways
- Catatonic behaviors
- Include a marked decrease in reactivity to the environment
- Negative symptoms
- Appear to reflect a diminution of normal functions
- Affective flattening
- Restrictions in the range and intensity of emotional expression
- Alogia
- Restriction in the fluency and productivity of thought and speech
- Reflects lessening of thoughts
- Avolution
- The inability to initiate or persist in goal directed activities
- Usually develops in the early to mid twenties for men
- Usually develops in the late 20s for women
- Onset is usually a slow development of signs and symptoms
- Full remission is rare
- Paranoid schizophrenia
- Dominated by delusions of persecution, along with delusions of grandeur
- May develop delusions of grandeur to explain why they are being persecuted
in this manner.
- Display prominent delusions or auditory hallucinations
- Preserving pretty good cognitive functioning
- Catatonic schizophrenia
- Marked by striking motor disturbances ranging from muscular rigidity
to random motor activity
- Go into an extreme of withdrawal known as a catatonic stupor
- Sit motionless and oblivious to the environment for long periods of time
- Can suddenly go into states of extreme agitation
- Need to be monitored closely to make sure they don't harm themselves
or others
- Disorganized schizophrenia
- A particularly severe deterioration of adaptive behavior
- Suffer from disorganized speech, behavior and flat or inappropriate affect
- May be accompanied by silliness and laughter that is not closely related
to the content of the speech
- May lead to a severe disruption in the ability to perform activities
of daily living