Behavior Disorders: Conceptual & Definitional Issues

Flashcards covering key vocabulary, models, criteria, and historical case studies related to defining behavior disorders.

General Paresis of the Insane

A neuropsychiatric condition first identified in Paris in the early 1800s, characterized initially by fatigue and headaches, progressing to memory loss, mania, grandiose delusions, severe motor deterioration, and death.

Behavior (Clinical Definition)

An inclusive construct encompassing observable actions, affect (emotion), cognition (thoughts and thought processes), and interpersonal relationships.

Disorder

An abnormal physical or mental condition.

Syndrome

A constellation of co-occurring signs and symptoms that characterize a particular abnormality or condition, driven by unknown or multiple factors rather than a single established pathogenesis.

Signs vs. Symptoms

Signs are directly observable features of a condition, whereas symptoms are features reported directly by the patient.

Essentialism

The doctrine or belief that things possess a set of defining inherent characteristics that make them what they are, and that essence is prior to existence.

Statistical Abnormality

A criterion defining abnormality based on deviation from a population's mean or mode; it fails as a defining feature of behavior disorder because non-pathological extreme behaviors exist, as do common symptoms.

Social Abnormality

A criterion defining abnormality based on non-conformity with social standards or contextual norms; it fails as a defining feature of disorder because harmless atypical activities are not disorders, while some common behaviors can be symptomatic.

Biological Abnormality

A state or condition that is irregular or deviant from the typical biological functioning of an organism, evaluated either within an individual over time or between organisms of a species.

Subjective Distress

An individual's self-reported or expressed pain, suffering, or psychological upset; it is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for defining a behavior disorder.

Dysfunction

An abnormality or failure in the function of a specified bodily organ, system, or psychobiological mechanism.

Impairment

The weakening or damaging of a faculty or function within a specific environmental or societal context, often signaling a need for clinical attention.

Code 302.0

The classification code assigned to homosexuality under sexual deviations in the DSM-II, which was officially removed from the manual by the APA Board of Trustees vote in 1973.

Drapetomania

A pseudoscientific 1851 diagnosis proposed by Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright claiming that enslaved Black people attempting to flee captivity were suffering from a mental illness.

Social Constructionist Account

A conceptual perspective asserting that behavior disorders are not objective, essentialist realities, but rather concepts created and shaped by social, cultural, and political forces.

Useful Abstractions

Socially constructed diagnostic labels that summarize constellations of co-occurring behaviors to help society differentiate between actions requiring intervention or study and those that do not.

Harmful Dysfunction Model

Jerome Wakefield's 1992 conceptualization of disorder, which integrates a factual evolutionary breakdown of natural function (dysfunction) with a value component indicating harm to the individual or society.

'Just So' Hypothesizing

A critique of evolutionary psychology explanations (highlighted by Chomsky) that create speculative, unprovable stories about how cognitive mechanisms evolved without direct empirical or fossil evidence.

Neurodiversity

A framework viewing neurological variations in sociability, learning, mood, and attention as natural human differences to be accommodated, rather than medical pathologies to be cured.

Autistics Self Advocacy Network (ASAN)

An advocacy group whose self-advocacy efforts contributed to the removal of Asperger's Disorder as a distinct diagnostic category and its subsumption into Autism Spectrum Disorder in the DSM-5.