Mental and Physical Health - Summary

Health Psychology

  • Studies the impact of psychological, behavioral, and cultural factors on health and wellness.

  • Aims to enhance health and health care using psychological principles.

  • Identifies behaviors like exercise, nutrition, sleep, and avoiding smoking as key to well-being.

Stress

  • Stress is responding to threatening or challenging events (stressors).

  • Too much stress increases susceptibility to disorders and diseases (e.g., heart disease, hypertension).

  • Type A personalities (competitive, impatient) are more prone to heart attacks compared to Type B (easy-going, relaxed) personalities.

  • Pessimism is linked to an increased risk of heart disease.

  • Eustress is defined as motivating stress.

  • Distress is defined as debilitating stress.

  • Stressors include catastrophes, significant life changes, daily hassles, and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs).

  • General adaptation syndrome describes stress in three phases: alarm reaction, resistance, and exhaustion.

  • Alarm reaction: Sympathetic nervous system activation (fight-flight-freeze).

  • Resistance phase: High temperature, blood pressure, respiration; endocrine system engaged.

  • Exhaustion phase: Resources depleted; greatest susceptibility to illness.

  • Tend-and-befriend theory: Reacting to stress by seeking social connections, more common in women.

  • Problem-focused coping: Solving the stressor directly.

  • Emotion-focused coping: Managing emotional reactions (e.g., deep breathing, meditation).

Positive Psychology

  • Studies human flourishing, well-being, resilience, and positive emotions.

  • Subjective well-being: Self-perceived happiness or life satisfaction.

  • Adaptation-level phenomenon: Happiness is relative to our own experiences.

  • Relative deprivation principle: Feeling worse off by comparing ourselves to others.

  • Character strengths and virtues: Wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, transcendence.

  • Ways to enhance well-being: Expressing gratitude, aerobic exercise, mindfulness and meditation, and involvement in faith communities.

  • Feel-good, do-good phenomenon: Helping others when in a good mood.

  • Posttraumatic growth: Positive growth after trauma or stress.

Psychological Disorders

  • Psychological disorder: A dysfunction in thoughts, emotions, or behaviors causing distress and impairing daily life, deviating from social norms.

  • Diagnosing requires training and evidence-based tools.

  • DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) and ICD (International Classification of Mental Disorders) are used to classify disorders.

  • Psychodynamic perspective: Unconscious thoughts and childhood experiences.

  • Humanistic perspective: Lack of social support and inability to fulfill potential.

  • Behavioral perspective: Maladaptive learned associations.

  • Cognitive perspective: Maladaptive thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, or emotions.

  • Biological perspective: Physiological or genetic issues.

  • Evolutionary perspective: Behaviors reducing survival likelihood.

  • Sociocultural perspective: Maladaptive social and cultural relationships.

  • Eclectic approach: Using multiple perspectives for diagnosis and treatment.

  • Diathesis-stress model: Genetic vulnerability + stressful life experiences. (Predisposition)

  • Biopsychosocial model: Combination of biological, psychological, and sociocultural factors.

Categories of Psychological Disorders

  • Anxiety Disorders: Excessive fear/anxiety with related behavior disturbances. Includes specific phobias, agoraphobia, generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder, and panic disorder.

  • Specific phobia: Irrational fear and avoidance of specific objects or situations.

  • Social anxiety disorder: Fear of being judged or watched by others.

  • Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD): Continual anxiety, tension, and autonomic arousal.

  • Panic disorder: Unpredictable episodes of intense dread (panic attacks).

  • Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD): Unwanted repetitive thoughts (obsessions) and/or actions (compulsions) that cause distress.

  • Hoarding disorder: Difficulty discarding possessions.

  • Trauma-and Stressor-Related Disorders: Psychological distress following a traumatic event.

  • Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): Flashbacks, nightmares, social withdrawal, hypervigilance, anxiety, and insomnia.

  • Depressive Disorders: Sad, empty, or irritable mood with physical and cognitive changes.

  • Major depressive disorder: Two or more weeks of significantly depressed moods and diminished interest in activities.

  • Symptoms of major depressive disorder include: depressed mood, reduced interest, appetite/weight changes, sleep changes, lethargy, feeling worthless, difficulty concentrating, suicidal thoughts.

  • Persistent depressive disorder: Depressed mood more days than not for at least 2 years.

  • Bipolar Disorders: Periods of mania and depression.

  • Mania: Hyperactive, wildly optimistic state.

  • Bipolar I Disorder: Mania lasting a week or longer, cycling to depression.

  • Bipolar II Disorder: Depression and milder hypomania.

  • Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders: Characterized by delusions, hallucinations, disorganized thinking/speech, disorganized motor behavior, and negative symptoms.

  • Positive symptoms: Inappropriate behaviors are present (e.g., delusions, hallucinations).

  • Negative symptoms: Appropriate behaviors are absent (e.g., flat affect, catatonia).

  • Delusions: False beliefs (e.g., persecution, grandeur).

  • Hallucinations: False perceptions (seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, or smelling things that aren't there).

  • Disorganized thinking/speech: Word salad.

  • Catatonia: Disordered movement.

  • Chronic schizophrenia: Symptoms appear by late adolescence; psychotic episodes last longer.

  • Acute schizophrenia: Begins at any age, often after trauma; recovery more likely.

  • Schizophrenia causes include genetics, prenatal virus exposure, and neurotransmitter imbalances (dopamine hypothesis).

Dissociative Disorders:

  • Conscious awareness becomes separated (dissociated) from previous memories, thoughts, and feelings.

  • Dissociative amnesia (with and without fugue).

  • Dissociative identity disorder.

  • Personality Disorders: Enduring patterns of behavior deviant from culture, leading to distress.

    • Cluster A: Odd or eccentric (e.g., paranoid, schizoid).

    • Cluster B: Dramatic, emotional, or erratic (e.g., antisocial, borderline).

    • Cluster C: Anxious and fearful (e.g., avoidant, dependent).

  • Feeding and Eating Disorders: Altered food consumption impairing health.

    • Anorexia nervosa: Maintaining a starvation diet despite being underweight.

    • Bulimia nervosa: Binge eating followed by inappropriate weight-loss behavior. (purging)

  • Neurodevelopmental Disorders: Onset during the developmental period; includes:

    • Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): Inability to focus.

    • Autism spectrum disorder (ASD): Limitations in communication and social interaction.

Treatment for Psychological Disorders

  • Past treatments: Institutionalization and inhumane methods.

  • Modern approaches: Deinstitutionalization and decentralized treatment.

  • Ethical principles: Beneficence, nonmaleficence, fidelity, responsibility, integrity, justice and respect.

  • Evidence-based practice: Integrating research with expertise and patient preferences.

  • Therapeutic alliance: Bond of trust between therapist and client.

  • Meta-analysis: Studies that analyze the results of multiple studies to reach an overall conclusion

Types of Psychological Therapies

  • Psychodynamic therapies: Uncover the unconscious mind, childhood experiences through free association and dream interpretation.

  • Humanistic therapy: Employs active listening and unconditional positive regard.
    *Active listening, genuineness, acceptance, and empathy

  • Behavioral therapy: Reduce unwanted behaviors using conditioning.

  • Counterconditioning: Evoking new responses to stimuli that trigger unwanted behaviors.

  • Exposure therapies: Treat anxieties by exposing people to feared stimuli (systematic desensitization, flooding).
    *Gradually increase anxiety-triggering stimuli

  • Aversion therapy: Associates an unpleasant state with an unwanted behavior.

  • Biofeedback: Regulate biological systems to manage anxiety.

  • Cognitive therapy: Teaches new, adaptive ways of thinking.

  • Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy (REBT): challenges illogical, self-defeating attitudes and assumptions

  • Dialectical Behavior Therapy: challenges negative thinking and behavior, attempts to make peace between two opposing forces — acceptance and change

  • The cognitive triad is a concept from cognitive therapy

    • Negative view of the self – “I’m worthless. ”

    • Negative view of the world – “The world is unfair. Negative view of the future – “Things will never get better. ”

  • Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy: combines cognitive therapy with behavior therapy

  • Group therapy: Provides benefits from group interaction allowing people to discover that others have problems similar to their own.

Biomedical (Biological) Approach to Treatment

  • Use of psychoactive drugs to change the brain’s chemistry

  • Affect brain’s circuitry with electrical stimulation, magnetic impulses, or psychosurgery

  • Use of hypnosis

  • Drug therapy and psychoactive medications interact with specific neurotransmitters in the central nervous system

  • Antipsychotic Drugs: Lessens agitated behavior, decreases hallucinations and delusions because it block dopamine receptors

  • Tardive dyskinesia is a movement disorder as bad side effect

  • Antianxiety drugs: Increases neurotransmitter GABA in limbic system to reduce anxiety, good for PTSD, Panic disorders, phobias, and generalized anxiety disorder

  • Antidepressant drugs: drugs used to treat depressive disorders They work by increasing the availability of norepinephrine or serotonin

  • Prozac is a selective-serotonin-reuptake-inhibitors (SSRIs) - Stop the reuptake of serotonin in the synapse so it stays in the system longer.

  • Mood-stabilizing drugs: Drugs like lithium that stabilize mood and help treat bipolar disorder and manic episodes

  • Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT): Severely depressed patients have a brief electric current is sent through the brain, this can produce memory loss, seizures, and convulsions, despite it being very invasive, many depressed patients seem to return to happier lives

  • Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS): Treats severe depression, and does not have similar side effects like electroconvulsive therapy

  • Psychosurgery: removes or destroys brain tissue in an effort to change behavior, very rare but ultimate last resort