Psychodiagnostic basics: DSM IV TR categories

• Psychological Disorders – a harmful dysfunction in which behavior is judged to be atypical, disturbing, maladaptive and unjustifiable
• DSM-IV – a widely used system for classifying psychological disorders; defines 17 major categories of ‘mental disorder,’ describes disorder and lists prevalence; no explanation of causes
• Medical Perspective – psychological disorders or mental illnesses (psychopathology) can be diagnosed based on symptoms and then therapy is sought to cure the illness; these disorders are understood to be physical in nature and can be diagnosed, treated and cured
• Bio-psycho-social perspective – how biological, psychological, and social factors interact to produce psychological disorders; mind and body are inseparable;
• Anxiety disorders – psychological disorders characterized by distressing, persistent anxiety or maladaptive behaviors that reduce anxiety; involve both feeling and cognition where there is an appraisal of one’s social skill and anxiety
• Generalized anxiety – one is continually tense, apprehensive, and autonomic nervous system is in a constant state of arousal
• Phobias – persistent, irrational fear and avoidance of a specific object, activity, situation; irrational fears that disrupt behavior
• Panic disorder – short-term episode of intense fear where one experiences terror and physiological sensation because something terrible is going to happen to them
• OCD – unwanted repetitive thoughts, obsessions and/or actions
• Learning perspective – researchers have looked at the relationship btwn anxiety and classical condition of fear; as we grow older we become conditioned to fear many things
• Biological perspective – using natural selection researchers have argued that humans are predisposed to fear threats faced by ancestors
• Mood disorders – psychological disorders characterized by emotional extremes; psychologists are trying to develop a theory
• Major depressive disorder – prolonged hopelessness and lethargy until normality; longer than two weeks
• Bipolar disorder – one alternates btwn depression and manic
• Mania – one is characteristically overly talkative, overactive, elated, lack of sleep, loud speech, overly optimistic, high self esteem; affects about 1% of population, men and women equally
• Biological Perspective – hereditary, women twice as vulnerable
• Social cognitive perspective – focusing in particular on control beliefs such as self defeating beliefs which may arise from learned helplessness, making bad experiences really worse
• Schizophrenia – disorganized or delusional thinking, disturbed perceptions and inappropriate emotions or actions – most debilitating of mood disorders
• Disorganized thinking – fragmented and distorted ways of thinking that may result from a breakdown in selective attention
• Delusions – false beliefs that may accompany psychotic disorders
• Disturbed perceptions – sees things that are not there; hearing voices to seeing, feeling and smelling things that are not actually there
• Subtypes
• Paranoid – preoccupation with delusions or hallucinations with themes of persecution or grandiosity
• Disorganized – disorganized speech or behavior or flat/inappropriate emotion
• Catatonic – immobility or excessive purposeless movement, extreme negativism and/or parrot like repeating of another’s speech of movements
• Undifferentiated – many unvaried symptoms
• Residual – withdrawal after hallucinations and delusions have disappeared