Disorders and Treatments Review

Disorders and Treatments Review

Psychological Disorder

• A syndrome marked by a clinically significant disturbance in an individual's cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior.
• Dysfunctional behaviors are maladaptive, disrupting day-to-day life.

Benefits and Burdens of Classification

Benefits:

• Creates order.
• Helps professionals communicate clearly.
• Helps determine treatment.
• Stimulates research.
• Reduces guilt and blame.
• Advocates for support.

Burdens:

• Labeling leads to self-fulfilling prophecy.
• Stigmatizes/dehumanizes those with a disorder.
• Leads to discrimination and stereotyping.
• May lead a person to not take responsibility for getting better.
• Creates a false dichotomy between normal and abnormal.
• Over-medicating people.

DSM/DSM V

• Reference book on mental health and brain-related conditions and disorders.

Anxiety Disorders

Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD)

• Person is unexplainably and continually tense/uneasy.

Panic Disorder

• Person exhibits sudden episodes of intense dread.

Phobias

• Person feels irrationally afraid of objects or situations.
  • Agoraphobia: Fear of situations where escape is difficult.

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD)

• Unwanted or repetitive thoughts and/or actions.

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

• Lingering memories, nightmares, and other symptoms for weeks after a severely threatening or uncontrollable event.

Mood Disorders

• Emotional extremes.
• Major Depressive Disorder.
• Seasonal Affective Disorder.
• Bipolar Disorder: Mood swings between depression and mania (hyperactive and impulsive).

Major Depressive Disorder

• Presence of at least five of the following symptoms:
  • Depressed mood most of the day.
  • Markedly diminished interest or pleasure in activities most of the day.
  • Significant weight loss or gain when not dieting, or significant decrease or increase in appetite.
  • Insomnia or sleeping too much.
  • Physical agitation or lethargy.
  • Fatigue or loss of energy.
  • Feeling worthless, or excessive or inappropriate guilt.
  • Problems in thinking, concentrating, or making decisions.
  • Recurrent thoughts of death and suicide.

Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)

• Type of depression that happens during certain seasons of the year (often fall and winter).

Bipolar Disorder

• Swings between depression and mania.

Schizophrenia

• Aka “split mind,” a disorder that affects how people think, feel, and behave.

Symptoms:

• Hallucinations: False sensory experience (seeing something that isn't there).
• Delusions: False, even preposterous beliefs not part of the person's culture.
• Referential thinking: Personal meaning to completely random events.
• Catatonia: Abnormal movements, behaviors, and withdrawal.
• Jumbled thinking and behavior.
• Inappropriate/flat affects.

Biological Factors:

• Genetic predisposition.
• Hereditary.
• Excess of neurotransmitter dopamine, which affects brain processes that control movement, emotional response, and the ability to experience pleasure and pain.
• Virus during pregnancy.
• Abnormal brain: Enlarged ventricles indicate atrophy in frontal and temporal lobe, small frontal cortex, high activity in thalamus and amygdala (hallucinations + paranoid).

Other Disorders

Somatic Symptom Disorder

• A psychological disorder in which the symptoms take a somatic (bodily) form without apparent physical cause.

Conversion Disorder

• A disorder in which a person experiences very specific genuine symptoms for which no psychological basis can be found.

Illness Anxiety Disorder (formerly hypochondria)

• A disorder in which a person interprets normal physical sensations as symptoms of a disease.

Dissociative Disorders

• Disorders in which conscious awareness becomes separated (dissociated) from previous memories, thoughts, and feelings. Symptoms could include sudden loss of memory or change in identity.

Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) (formerly multiple personality disorder)

• A rare disorder in which a person exhibits two or more distinct and alternating personalities.

Eating Disorders

• Anorexia: A person maintains a starvation diet despite being 15% or more underweight.
• Bulimia: A person alternates binge eating with purging/laxatives, excessive exercise, or fasting.
• Binge Eating: Significant binge eating followed by distress or guilt.

Personality Disorders

• Avoidant: Show anxiety or fear of rejection.
• Schizoid: Show eccentric or odd behavior.
• Histrionic: Dramatic or impulsive behavior.

Anti-Social Personality Disorder

• A personality disorder in which a person (usually male) exhibits a lack of conscience for wrongdoing, even towards friends and family members.
  • Sometimes called sociopath or psychopath.
  • Lack of conscience is usually apparent by age 15 (lie, cheat, steal).
  • Criminality is not an essential component of anti-social disorder; many criminals do not fit the profile for anti-social disorder because of love/care they show for their families.
  • When paired with intelligence, con artist or ruthless corporate executive.

Treatments

Psychological Therapies

• Used for psychological disorders (e.g., phobias).

Biomedical Therapies

• Used for psychological disorders that are biological (e.g., schizophrenia), using prescribed medication that affects the nervous system.

Eclectic Approach

• Using various techniques from psychotherapy or a treatment method with a combination of both therapy and medication.

Types of Therapies

Psychoanalytic

• Focuses on uncovering unconscious internal conflict.
  • Free association
  • Dream interpretation
  • Resistance
  • Transference

Humanistic

• Emphasizes people's inherent potential for self-fulfillment.
• Aims to boost people's self-awareness and self-acceptance.
• Conscious over unconscious.
• Focuses on the here and now (as opposed to the past).
• The path to growth is taking immediate responsibility for one's feelings and actions.

Behavioral

• Application of learning principles to the elimination of unwanted behaviors.
  • Counterconditioning: Using classical conditioning strategies to retrain the brain.
  • Exposure therapies: Behavioral technique that treats anxieties by exposing people to their fears (systematic desensitization, virtual reality exposure therapy).
  • Aversive conditioning: Associates unpleasant state with unwanted behavior.
  • Token economy: Earning a “token” for exhibiting desired behavior.

Cognitive

• Teaches people new, more adaptive ways of thinking, based on the assumption that thoughts intervene between events and our emotional reactions.
  • Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT): Challenge irrational beliefs, as per Albert Ellis.
  • Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT): Change thinking, change behavior.

Group

• A form of psychotherapy in which a group of patients meets to describe and discuss their problems together under the supervision of a therapist.

Family

• A form of psychotherapy that helps family members better understand each other, support one another, and work through difficult situations.

Self-Help

• Brings people together who are dealing with similar challenges to help build support and community around shared life experiences.

Biomedical Treatments

Lithium Carbonate

• Mood stabilizer.

Anti-Depressants

• Also used to treat anxiety disorders, OCD, and PTSD.
• Increases the availability of norepinephrine or serotonin.
  • Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRI) i.e., Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil.

Anti-Anxiety

• Depress the CNS so people can relax, i.e., Xanax, Ativan.

Anti-Psychotics

• Block/inhibit dopamine.
  • Side effects: Tardive dyskinesia - facial tics and other involuntary movements.

Mood Stabilizers

• Medications used in the treatment of bipolar disorder.

Lobotomy

• Surgery that severs connections in the brain's prefrontal cortex.

ECT (Electroconvulsive Therapy)

• A procedure done under anesthesia where small electric currents pass through the brain, intentionally causing a brief seizure.

rTMS (Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation)

• A brain stimulation technique in which the patient is seated with a large wire coil positioned near the scalp that generates rapidly changing magnetic pulses that induce an electric field.

Light Therapy

• Mimics outdoor light to possibly cause a chemical change in the brain that lifts your mood and eases other symptoms of SAD.

Therapeutic Lifestyle Changes

• A way of life in which one incorporates healthy changes as it relates to their needs.