Soc of Mental Illness- Exam 2

Correspondence Bias

The tendency to overemphasize personal characteristics and downplay situational factors when explaining others' behavior. This bias can affect our understanding of mental illness by attributing behavior to individual traits rather than contextual influences.

Essentialism

foundational, physiological differences between males and females guide and direct the psychological and behavioral orientation of individuals and the gendered structure of the social order.

Gender

 represented the social, psychological, political, and economic implications of those differences. gender is a social construction, and that sexuality and gender are fluctuating, fluid, and continuous rather than discrete

Normative Theory

 cultural beliefs in the form of feeling rules, or cultural norms, specify the appropriate type, intensity, duration, and target of subjective feeling. These norms govern emotions just as other cultural folkways and mores guide behavior. They tell us what we should and should not feel and express in a given situation and time

Restrictive Emotionality

the tendency to inhibit the expression of emotions and unwillingness to express intimate feelings. The concept assumes that men and women experience emotions similarly but that women appear to express them more because men express them less.

Sex

 referred to biological differences in human males and females

Structural Theory of Emotions

• Kemper (1978).

  • Kemper thought that status and social power have a strong influence on subjective feelings and provoke different emotions during social interactions. During an interaction, people holding a higher status in a relationship are in a different emotional position than those who have less.

  • Having “the upper hand” leads a person to more positive feelings like happiness, comfort, and contentment. Those with less power, however, experience more negative emotions such as fear, sadness, and anger (Kemper 1978; Simon and Nath 2004)

Avoidance

 victims often develop avoidance tendencies and try to avoid interactions that cause anxiety. Avoidance often includes feelings of numbness, blunted sensations, and a denial of the impact and meaning of the event Avoidance symptoms, however, increase with time. It bears mentioning that avoidance and intrusion are comparable to the symptoms of PTSD.

Double Jeopardy

a situation in which a person is a target of discrimination based on two statuses. 

Ethnicity

 a cultural group, people who share a distinct language, customs and rituals, national origins, and cultural identity.

Ethnorace

groups that are socially recognized as possessing a distinct ethnic-specific identity and/or may share certain phenotype characteristics such as skin color that are socially relevant for identity and lived experience.

Familism

The mental health of Hispanics is believed to benefit from the community’s strong orientation toward family

Intrusion

how much the event “gets into one’s head.” Nightmares, repetitious behavior, and intrusive thoughts and images are typical of the effects of racist encounters. The type of racial experience is related to the level of intrusion symptoms: minor incidents have less effect than those rated as moderate or severe, and symptoms tended to decrease over time

Minority Stress Model

social disadvantages translate into health disparities. lower and stigmatized social status exposes minority groups to more stressful life circumstances and fewer social and economic resources to manage them

Model Minority

seen as “quiet, uncomplaining, and hard-working who achieved success without depending on the government. however, has proven to be a destructive concept because it conceals real social problems among some of the groups included under the Asian American umbrella

Race

a controversial term that emerged during the colonial era of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to represent biological classes or categories within the human species.

Sub-threshold Symptoms

indicators of the disorders are present but not at the level necessary to be assigned a DSM diagnosis.

Identity Diffusion

loss of capacity for self-definition and commitment to values, goals, or relationships and painful sense of incoherence

Identity Integration

unfragmented sense of self where all aspects of personality and ability are consolidated into a solitary whole

Helicoptering

 parents who are over-involved in their children’s lives and who intrusively and manipulatively control their children’s behaviors

Launching

When young people reach 18 or 19 years of age, for instance, they are expected to make decisions about how they want to enter adulthood.  People usually choose some combination of getting a job, marrying, going to college, or joining the military.

Life Course Studies

strive to understand how people’s lives evolve over time

Looking glass self

a person’s sense of self develops through social interaction.  Individuals base their understanding of themselves on how they interpret the “reflection” of their appearance; that is, how people act toward them

Problematic Social Media Use

 a person who is excessively motivated to social media, demonstrates excessive concern about social media, and is so devoted to it that other relationships, studies, or work are negatively affected

Pseudo-Depression

 older adults who do not complain of melancholia, hopelessness, or somatic symptoms, but present with cognitive and memory deficits

Self-efficacy

an individual's belief in their capacity to execute the behaviors needed to succeed in a specific task or reach a specific goa

Socialization

we learn how to function in society. abusive punishment can interrupt children’s sense of security and confidence, which can impair their schooling and work futures and harm their ability to form stable relationships

Somatic Depression

many depressed older adults mask their depressive symptoms. older adults will complain of changes in sleep patterns, appetite, weight, energy levels, and sexual functioning rather than communicating their feelings of sadness or hopelessness

Cry of Pain/Entrapment Model

social isolation leads to feelings of defeat and entrapment, and when individuals are unable to cope with stress, they start to feel there is no safe exit or imminent rescue (farmers)

Ethnic Density Hypothesis

living in ethnoracially homogeneous neighborhoods improves mental health and lowers the risk of depression when compared to persons living in neighborhoods with fewer people of their own ethnorace.

Gemeinshaft

societies and communities are those where residents live more communally and possess a universal sense of solidarity. The population tends to be less diverse socially and culturally

Gesellschaft

 urban and socially heterogeneous. They are characterized by rational self-interest and impersonal behavior. Gesellschaft emerges when many people live close together and are organized in governmental and industrial bureaucracies

Residential Segregation Hypothesis

living in neighborhoods with a high proportion of residents from their own ethnoracial group increases the risk of psychological symptoms. The argument here is that mental health problems arise because of ethnoracial isolation.  A primary example is the high concentration of poverty often found in urban ethnoracial communities. 

Drug Abuse

any consumption of any chemical substance that has some mental or behavioral effect.

Drug Addiction

 any use of an illegal substance or illegal use of a legal drug.

Drug Dependency

 using a substance to satisfy an emotional or behavioral need. Continued use stems not from physiological craving but from the emotional satisfaction that the drug creates. .

Social Problem

refers to any social condition that interrupts or damages usual social functioning for large numbers of people and has negative consequences for the collective society

Transitional Object

TOs are objects that we endow with magical qualities to relieve stress

Health Beleifs Model

a classical socio-cognitive approach to health care utilization. This theory contends that individuals will initiate mental health services when they believe that their symptoms are having serious consequences for daily living

Inchoate Feelings

the first phase of the moral career of person experiencing depression. emotions that are confusing, ambiguous, and perhaps unrecognized. They are emotions that cannot yet be labeled with a word, which implies that they are not well understood.

Individual Discriminatory Behavior

Expressions of individual discrimination can include hostile language, bullying, lack of sympathy or understanding by others, harassment, and physical assault.

Interactional Discrimination

the process of social exchanges and emerges as an individual socially engages a person who has a mental health problem. During these interactions, dynamics change or are different than they would be if the other person were not discredited by the stigma.

Moral Career

to describe the experience of having mental health symptoms and engaging the treatment system.

Network Episode Theory

people are rational actors, as the HBM and SBM suggest, but their behavior occurs within the context of people in their social networks (friends, relatives, colleagues) who push and pull them into (or away from) mental health treatment.

Self Labeling

When a person is aware of the negative public beliefs and stereotypes about mental illness, they run the risk of internalizing and believing them

Socio-Behavioral Model

dates to the 1960s and was initially devised by Andersen (1995) to explain families’ use of health services. The model has three core components that influence utilization:

• need (something is wrong)

• predisposing factors (structural influence on accessing care)

• enabling factors (factors that facilitate or bar access to care)

Stigma

public attitudes toward mental health patients are negative, and patients are keenly aware of the hostile stereotypes that have been imposed on them by others

Stigmatization

is the social process by which a person migrates from a whole and usual person to a tainted discounted one. Stigmatization is one method for creating an “us” and “them” hierarchy in society

Structural Discrimination

stems from the way society is organized and includes institutional practices that disadvantage mentally ill persons. One example is the inadequate funding allotted for mental health care

Conceptual Medicalization

The language of conceiving a condition as medical. It takes the form of a medical vocabulary used to define nonmedical things.

Demedicalization

The process by which problems lose their medicalized definition and are no longer considered a medical condition

Disease

is a condition in which identifiable symptoms can be attributed to a specific cause. have a defined set of symptoms and produce consistent physiological change

Disorder

is a disturbance or interruption of normal functioning that interferes with a person’s customary activities and feelings of wellbeing.

Institutional Medicalization

A form of medicalization that evolves when physicians or other authorities such as administrators direct nonmedical personnel to maintain a medical rubric for treating a psychological condition. The institution itself controls the medicalization narrative and installs it as treatment. policy regardless of whether individuals’ problems are biophysical or not.

Interactional Medicalization

A form of medicalization that evolves from interaction between physician and patient during which the physician uses medical language and treatment plans to address a nonmedical problem. For instance, a physician may treat a person’s unhappy family life by prescribing a tranquilizer.

Kraepelinian Biological Psychiatry

sought to establish psychiatry as a clinical science and devised the modern theory of psychiatry that all psychological disorders are diseases caused by “natural disease entities

Medicalization

• According to Peter Conrad (1992), medicalization occurs when:

  •  A problem is defined and described in medical terms with medical language;

  • A medical perspective is used to understand a problem;

  • Medical procedures are used to intervene and respond to that problem.

  • The pharmaceutical industry plays into this mindset. Notorious for “disease mongering,” which is a strategy to make healthy people believe they are sick

Neurons

an electrically excitable cell that acts as the basic working unit of the brain and nervous system

Neurotransmitter

 A group of chemicals that serve as messengers in nerve synapses.

Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors

(SSRIs) are the most prescribed drugs for

Depression Examples: Prozac, Paxil, and Zoloft makes for irregular connections between neurons. SSRIs block the reabsorption of serotonin, theoretically leaving more serotonin in the vesicle, which in turn improves communication from one nerve ending to another.

Serotonin

the most well-known neurotransmitter. In the serotonin theory of depression, synapses in the brain have insufficient amounts of serotonin that cause irregular connections between neurons and negatively affect emotions.

Synapses

the space between neurons, or nerve cells.

Syndrome

 refers to an observable and correlated set of symptoms or physical markers that constitute a specific condition for which a direct cause is not understood. There are hundreds of syndromes, some of which are very serious and can cause death.

Vesicles

At the end of each neuron are vesicles, which are sacs that hold neurotransmitters such as serotonin until they are triggered to release them when a nerve signal reaches the neuron. Receptors in the next neuron receive the neurotransmitter and continue moving the signal down the nerve pathway.