Abnormal Psychology: Historical Perspective and Diagnostic Concepts

Vocabulary practice flashcards covering foundational concepts, the four D's of abnormality, diagnostic manuals, historical eras, and major milestones in abnormal psychology.

Deviance

A criterion of abnormal psychology where deviation from the norm is so prevalent that it halts or interferes with development and life.

Distress

A criterion of abnormal psychology characterized by subjective suffering that produces damaging effects and interferes with an individual's health.

Dysfunction

A criterion of abnormal psychology occurring when abnormal behavior significantly interferes with daily functioning, preventing an individual from living as a healthy person.

Danger

A criterion of abnormal psychology describing behavior that places the individual or others at risk of physical harm.

Treatment (Therapy)

A systematic procedure designed to change abnormal behavior into more normal or typical behavior.

Three Essential Features of Treatment (Jerome Frank)

The key components present in all therapy: a sufferer seeking relief, a trained and socially accepted healer, and a series of contacts between them to produce changes in the sufferer's emotional state, attitudes, and behavior.

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health (DSM)

The official classification manual used in the United States to outline diagnostic criteria and symptoms for mental health disorders, with the DSM-5 published in $2013$.

International Classification of Diseases (ICD)

A global diagnostic manual developed by the World Health Organization (WHO) that covers both medical and psychological illnesses, widely used outside the United States.

Trephination

A Stone Age surgical intervention in which a stone instrument was used to cut circular sections into the skull to provide an exit route for trapped evil spirits believed to cause abnormal behavior.

Exorcism

A supernatural intervention common in Biblical times, performed by priests or shamans using prayers, chanting, insults, starvation, or whipping to drive possessing entities from a person's body.

Humoral Theory

Hippocrates' physiological theory positing that psychological and physical health depends on the balance of four internal fluids: yellow bile, black bile, blood, and phlegm.

Yellow Bile

One of Hippocrates' four humors, an excess of which was hypothesized to induce mania.

Black Bile

One of Hippocrates' four humors, a surplus of which was hypothesized to cause melancholia.

Mass Madness

A phenomenon during the Middle Ages where widespread fear of war, urban uprisings, and devastating plagues led to large-scale shared outbreaks of abnormal behavior across entire regions.

Johann Weyer

A German physician active between $1400$ and $1700$ who became the first doctor to specialize in mental illness, earning him recognition as the founder of modern psychopathology.

Asylums

Institutions originally established during the Renaissance to provide ethical, humane care for mental patients, which by the mid-sixteenth century degenerated into overcrowded, cruel containment facilities.

Bethlehem Hospital

A London facility converted into an asylum in $1547$ that became notorious for chaotic, abusive conditions and public tourism where visitors paid to view institutionalized patients.

Somatogenic Perspective

The view that abnormal psychological functioning has physical causes, initially rooted in Hippocratic medicine and revived during the nineteenth century by biological discoveries.

Emil Kraepelin

A nineteenth-century psychiatrist who revived the somatogenic perspective by publishing a textbook in $1883$ that classified mental disorders analogously to physical diseases.

Benjamin Rush

An American physician who wrote the first American textbook on psychiatry in $1812$.

Dorothea Dix

An American reformer who initiated a campaign in $1842$ to reform mental hospitals and advocate for humane treatment of psychiatric patients.

Lightner Witmer

A psychologist who established the first psychological clinic in the United States at the University of Pennsylvania in $1896$.

Affordable Care Act of 2014

United States legislation that mandated insurance coverage for mental health care, which unintentionally incentivized clinicians to overdiagnose mild conditions to secure reimbursement.

2023 World Happiness Report

A triannual assessment ($2020$-$2022$) tracking subjective well-being across over $150$ countries using six variables: Real GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity, and perceptions of corruption.