Psychological Disorders

What is a Psychological Disorder

Where do we draw the line between grief and depression

How does race and wealth affect getting diagnosed with a psychological disorder?

Defining Psychological Disorders

Psychological Disorder - a disturbance in people’s thoughts, emotions, or behaviors that causes distress or suffering and impairs their daily lives.

• Believing that your home must be thoroughly cleaned every weekend is not a disorder — but when compulsive daily cleaning rituals interfere with work and leisure, you may have a psychological disorder

Diagnosing psychological disorders varies across time and culture

Understanding Psychological Disorders

The way we perceive problems influences how we react to them

• if you treat it like a bubble it will act like a bubble

Philippe Pinel thought that madness was not demonic possession but a sickness of the mind caused by stress and inhumane conditions

• duh

The Medical Model

Medical Model - the concept that diseases, in this case psychological disorders, have physical causes that can be diagnosed, treated, and, in most cases, cured, often through treatment in a hospital.

The Biosocial Approach

Calling them a “sickness” also put the influence of biology up front

Major Depressive Disorder and Schizophrenia happen world wide

Cultures can influence them too

• In Latin American cultures, some experience susto — intense anxiety or distress triggered by a traumatic or frightening event, which is believed to cause the soul to leave the body

• The eating disorders anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa occur mostly in food-abundant Western cultures.

Our mind and body work as one

• Emotions can trigger a physical response

• A physical response can trigger emotions

Epigenetics - the study of the molecular ways by which environments can influence gene expression (without a DNA change).

People who are diagnosed with one disorder are more likely to be diagnosed with another one

Classifying Disorders - and Labeling People

Classification is a quick way to give lots of information

In psychiatry and psychology, classification also attempts to predict a disorder’s future course, suggest appropriate treatment, and guide research into its causes

American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders

• The DSM-5 is a categorical approach (symptoms are present or not)

  • Either have to meet all the criteria, or meet a certain amount

• includes diagnostic codes from the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases (ICD), which makes it easy to track worldwide trends in psychological disorders.

Field tests of the DSM-5 have faired either well or poorly

Critics say the DSM-5 casts to “wide of a net” and how almost any behavior could count as a psychological disorder

• the DSM-5 classified bereavement grief and distress following loss as a depressive disorder. Critics wondered whether such grief — which one grieving person described as “not a problem to be solved, but a process to be lived through”

• Grief depends on the person

Some psychologists take a dimensional approach when it comes to labeling disorders

• Examines behavior along a spectrum, not a “yes or no” basis

Diagnostic labels can be subjective opinions, not scientific facts

Labels can create stigma

• can make it hard for “mentally ill” people to get a job, get housing

Anxiety Disorders, Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders, Trauma- and Stressor-Related Disorders, and Somatic Symptom and Related Disorders

Anxiety is a part of life. It can help or hurt us. Some people, however, are especially prone to fearing the unknown and noticing and remembering perceived threats — as if living with horror movie music playing in the background

Anxiety Disorders

Anxiety Disorders - a group of disorders characterized by excessive fear and anxiety and related maladaptive behaviors.

Social Anxiety Disorder - intense fear and avoidance of social situations.

• experience heart palpitations, tremors, blushing, and sweating

Generalized Anxiety Disorder

Generalized Anxiety Disorder - an anxiety disorder in which a person is continually tense, fearful, and in a state of autonomic nervous system arousal.

Cannot identify, relive or avoid anxiety

• Anxiety is free-floating (not tied to a specific thing)

Often happens along with a depressed mood

Panic Disorder

Panic Disorder - an anxiety disorder marked by unpredictable minutes-long episodes of intense dread in which a person may experience terror and accompanying chest pain, choking, or other frightening sensations; often followed by worry over a possible next attack.

Can lead people to avoid situations where the panic attacks occur

Specific Phobias

Specific Phobias - an anxiety disorder marked by a persistent, irrational fear and avoidance of a specific object, activity, or place.

• That one lady who is scared of olives

Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder - a disorder characterized by unwanted and repetitive thoughts (obsessions), actions (compulsions), or both.

Our everyday lives are filled with rituals and habits

But they cross the fine line between typical behavior and disordered behavior when they persistently interfere with everyday living and cause significant distress.

• Checking that the door is locked 10 times vs once

Even if you know the thoughts are irrational, the thoughts can become so haunting, and the compulsive rituals so intensely time-consuming, that it feels impossible to stop them

There are other OCD related disorders

• hoarding disorder (cluttering their space with acquired possessions they can’t part with)

• body dysmorphic disorder (preoccupation with perceived body defects; repeatedly checking their appearance in the mirror)

• trichotillomania (hair-pulling disorder)

• excoriation (skin-picking) disorder

Trauma- and Stressor-Related Disorders

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder - a disorder characterized by haunting memories, nightmares, hypervigilance, avoidance of trauma-related stimuli, social withdrawal, jumpy anxiety, numbness of feeling, and/or insomnia lingering for 4 weeks or more after a traumatic experience.

Trauma and Stressor Related Disorders - a group of disorders in which exposure to a traumatic or stressful event is followed by psychological distress.

Many of us will experience a traumatic event in our life

• two-thirds of people, after traumatic experiences, display resilience by returning to their baseline of healthy functioning

Posttraumatic Growth - positive psychological changes following a struggle with extremely challenging circumstances and life crises.

• A heart attack triggers us to live a healthy life

1 in 5 people have PTSD symptoms

Some psychologists think PTSD has been over diagnosed

Somatic Symptom and Related Disorders

Somatic Symptom Disorders - a psychological disorder in which the symptoms take a somatic (bodily) form without apparent physical cause.

Being told the problem is “all in your head” is not helpful

• the symptoms are being felt physically

The symptoms differ from person to person

Cultural context affects people’s physical complaints and how they explain them

• In China, anxiety disorders are the most common psychological disorder

• psychological explanations of anxiety and depression are socially less acceptable there than in many Western countries, so people less often express the emotional aspects of distress

Illness Anxiety Disorder - a disorder in which a person interprets normal physical sensations as symptoms of a disease.

• A normal headache is a sign of a horrific disease when in reality it is just a headache

Understanding These Disorders

How do these anxious feelings and thoughts arise?

Learning

Our fear responses can become linked with formerly neutral objects and events through classical conditioning.

anxious or traumatized people learn to associate their anxiety with certain cues

• Me and the School Bus

Anxiety or an anxiety-related disorder is more likely to develop when bad events happen unpredictably and uncontrollably

Even a single painful or frightening event may trigger a full-blown phobia, thanks to classical conditioning’s stimulus generalization and operant conditioning’s reinforcement.

• Stimulus generalization occurs when a person experiences a fear-provoking event and later develops a fear of similar events.

• Reinforcement helps maintain learned fears and anxieties.

Cognition

Cognition plays a factor in what we learn to fear

Why do all wild monkeys fear snakes, but monkeys raised in a lab don’t?

When a snake was present, the lab-raised monkeys repeatedly observed the wild-raised monkeys refusing to reach for food. Can you predict what happened? The lab-raised monkeys also developed a strong fear of snakes that persisted when retested 3 months later

Humans learn what to fear by observing others

Anxiety is often a response to the “fake news” we produce ourselves

• tend to be hypervigilant

Biology

Genes

Some people have genes that make them like orchids — fragile, yet capable of beauty under favorable circumstances. Others are like dandelions — hardy and able to thrive in varied circumstances

Even when raised separately, identical twins may develop similar specific phobias

There are genes that are associated with OCD and PTSD

• Also gene variations that deal with anxiety disorders

Experience affects whether a gene will be expressed

• nature + nurture

The Brain

Traumatic experiences alter our brain, paving fear pathways that become easy inroads for more fear experiences

Social anxiety disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, panic attacks, specific phobias, OCD, and PTSD express themselves biologically as overarousal of brain areas involved in impulse control and habitual behaviors.

Natural Selection

we humans seem biologically prepared to fear the threats our ancestors faced.

Compulsive acts typically exaggerate behaviors that helped them survive.

Substance Use Disorders

Psychoactive Drug - a natural or synthetic chemical substance that alters the brain, causing changes in perceptions, thoughts, moods, and behaviors.

• Caffeine is a psychoactive drug!

Substance Use Disorder - a disorder characterized by continued substance use despite significant life disruption.

Types of Psychoactive Drugs

Depressants

Depressants - drugs (such as alcohol, barbiturates, and benzodiazepines) that reduce (depress) brain activity and slow body functions.

Alcohol

Alcohol slows activity in a part of the brain that controls judgment and inhibitions

Alcohol focuses attention on an immediate arousing situation (say, a provocation) and distracts us from future consequences

Alcohol causes memory troubles as it disrupts long term memory processing

Alcohol slows sympathetic nervous system activity

Alcohol Use Disorder - alcohol use marked by a combination of symptoms that may include tolerance, withdrawal, and a drive to continue despite problematic use.

• Small quantities of alcohol increases the risk of becoming an alcoholic

Barbiturates

Barbiturates - drugs that depress central nervous system activity, reducing anxiety but impairing memory and judgment.

Stimulants

Stimulants - drugs (such as caffeine, nicotine, and the more powerful cocaine, amphetamines, and methamphetamine) that excite neural activity and speed up body functions

• feel alert, lose weight, or boost mood or athletic performance

Nicotine

Nicotine - a stimulating and highly addictive psychoactive drug in tobacco products.

Users develop a tolerance, which means they need more nicotine to feel the same amount of high

The leading cause of preventable death

Repeated attempts at quitting are successful

• Half of all Americans who have ever smoked have quit, some with the aid of a nicotine replacement drug and a support group.

Cocaine

Cocaine - a powerful and addictive stimulant derived from the coca plant; produces temporary alertness and euphoria.

Snorted, injected, smoked

Heightened reactions

Stimulates the brain’s reward pathways

Methamphetamine

Amphetamines - drugs that stimulate neural activity, causing speeded-up body functions and associated energy and mood changes.

Methamphetamine - a powerfully addictive drug that stimulates the central nervous system with speeded-up body functions and associated energy and mood changes; over time, reduces baseline dopamine levels.

Reduces the brain’s normal level of dopamine it produces

Hallucinogens

Hallucinogens - psychedelic (“mind-manifesting”) drugs, such as LSD, that distort perceptions and trigger sensory images in the absence of sensory input.

• begins with simple geometric forms, such as a spiral

• more meaningful images, which may be seen as part of a tunnel-like vision; others may be replays of past emotional experiences

• People frequently feel separated (or dissociated) from their body and experience dreamlike scenes.

  • Their sense of self dissolves, as does the border between themselves and the external world

Near-Death Experiences - an altered state of consciousness reported after a close brush with death (such as cardiac arrest); often similar to drug-induced hallucinations.

LSD

LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) - a powerful hallucinogenic drug; also known as acid.

• interferes with the serotonin neurotransmitter system.

Ecstasy

Ecstasy (MDMA) - a synthetic mild hallucinogen and stimulant. Produces euphoria and social intimacy, but with short-term health risks and longer-term changes to serotonin-producing neurons and to mood and cognition.

• In a social setting, they will feel intimately connected to the people around them

Causes severe dehydration, and damages serotonin-producing neurons

• It helps regulate our body rhythms (including sleep), immune system, and memory and other cognitive functions

Opioids

Opioids - opium and its derivatives, such as morphine and heroin; depress neural activity, temporarily lessening pain and anxiety.

• They also include pain-relief narcotics such as codeine, OxyContin, Vicodin, and morphine

• if use continues, the brain eventually stops producing endorphins

Drug companies started the Opioid epidemic by aggressively promoting them while downplaying their side effects

Cannabis

Cannabis - a product of the plant Cannabis sativa, which has both psychoactive (THC-containing) and nonpsychoactive (CBD-containing) parts.

THC - the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis.

Inhaled gets to the brain quicker

eater is slower and an unpredictable pace

Studies find that the THC in a single joint may induce psychiatric symptoms such as hallucinations, delusions, and anxiety

Weed is classified as a mild hallucinogenic

THC and its byproducts can linger in the body for weeks

The more often a person uses cannabis, the greater the risk of anxiety, depression, psychosis, and suicidal behavior

Understanding Substance Use Disorders

Biological Influences

identified genes associated with alcohol use disorder and related nicotine and cannabis use disorders

If an identical rather than a fraternal twin is diagnosed with alcohol use disorder, the other twin also has an increased risk for alcohol problems

Large studies of adopted people, twins, and siblings found evidence of both genetic and environmental influences.

Psychological and Social-Cultural Influences

Those without close, secure attachments with family and friends are more likely to turn to substance use

• Alcohol use disorder coincides with a doubled risk of depression and anxiety

• By temporarily dulling the pain of self-awareness, psychoactive drugs may offer a distraction from depression, anger, anxiety, or unpleasant experiences

Substance abuse varies across cultures

Depressive Disorders and Bipolar Disorders

What is the difference between sadness and depression?

27% of college students have been diagnosed with depression

People with major depressive disorder, however, experience hopelessness and lethargy that doesn’t always match the situation, and that lasts several weeks or months

Sadness protects us by forcing us to slow down and conserve energy

After reassessing our life, we can consider how to redirect our energy in ways that may reduce our depression

Depressive Disorders

Depressive Disorder - a group of disorders characterized by an enduring sad, empty, or irritable mood, along with physical and cognitive changes that affect a person’s ability to function.

Major Depressive Disorder - a disorder in which a person experiences five or more symptoms lasting 2 or more weeks. In the absence of drug use or a medical condition, at least one symptom is either (1) depressed mood or (2) loss of interest or pleasure.

• The most common of the depressive disorders

You can also feel depressed with milder symptoms that last a much longer period of time

• persistent depressive disorder

, feel unusually depressed a week before your menses

• premenstrual dysphoric disorder

experience parts of depression and anxiety at the same time

• mixed anxiety-depressive disorder

feel depressed alongside severe irritability that starts at a young age

• disruptive mood dysregulation disorder

Depression is a global health crisis

Bipolar Disorders

Bipolar Disorders - disorders in which a person experiences the overexcited state of mania (or milder hypomania) and usually experiences periods of depression.

Mania - an unusually excited and overly ambitious mood state in which people show dangerously poor judgment, less need for sleep, and increased energy

Bipolar 1 experience rapid cycling between mania and depression

Bipolar 2 switch between depression and a milder hypomania

People have trouble regulating their emotions

Associated with creativity

Understanding Depressive Disorders and Bipolar Disorders

Behaviors and thoughts change with depression.

Depression is widespread, with women at greater risk.

Stress and negative events often precede depression.

Compared with generations past, depression strikes earlier and more often, with the highest rates among teens and young adults

Depression sometimes returns

Most people with depression can recover on their own and thrive.

Biological Influences

Genes:

• Major depressive disorder and bipolar disorders run in families

• But depression is a complex condition. Many genes work together, each producing small effects that interact with other factors to increase depression risk.

Brain Structure and Activity:

• Unique brain circuitry that is linked with depression

• During depression, brain activity slows; during mania, it increases

• Depression causes the brain’s reward centers to be less active

Nutritional Effects

• Certain foods, such as refined sugar and red meat, have been linked to inflammation

  • Inflammation and depression often go hand in hand

Psychological and Social Influences

Our life experiences act upon our genetics

Negative Thoughts and Negative Moods

• Women’s higher risk of depression can be connected with our increased amount of “ruminating”

• People with depression respond to bad events in a negative, self-focused way

  • blaming themselves

• Learned helplessness

• What comes first: The pessimistic explanatory style or the depressed mood?

Depression’s Vicious Cycle

• Depression is brought upon by events that disrupt our sense of who we are and why we matter

• disruptions in turn lead to brooding, which is rich soil for growing negative feelings

• That negativity causes others to reject us

Risk of Harm to Self and Others

Understanding Suicide

Women are much more likely than men are to attempt

Men are twice as likely to die

Depressed people are at a greater risk to attempt

• Yet people seldom elect suicide while in the depths of depression, when energy and will are lacking. The risk increases when they begin to rebound and become capable of following through

People — especially older adults — may choose death as an alternative to current or future suffering, a way to switch off unendurable pain or relieve a perceived burden on family members.

arise when people feel like they don’t belong or are a burden to others, when they feel demoralized, or when they are unable to experience joy

Difficult to predict

• some researchers look at epigenetic marks to determine increase level or risk

Non-suicidal Self-Injury

Takes many forms

cut or burn their skin, hit themselves, pull their hair out, poison themselves, or insert objects under their nails or skin.

Less able to tolerate emotional distress

• gain relief from intense negative thoughts through the distraction of pain.

• attract attention and possibly get help.

• Relieve guilt by punishing themselves.

• get others to change their negative behavior (bullying, criticism).

• fit in with a peer group.

Does not lead to suicide

Does Disorder Lead to Danger

Mass shootings, and the media coverage that follows, often reinforce public perceptions that people with psychological disorders are dangerous

Most violent criminals and mass murderers are not mentally ill, and most mentally ill people are not violent

People with disorders that commit violent crimes often are doing them due to delusions/hallucinations

More likely to be the victim of a crime than the perpetrator

Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia - a disorder characterized by delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, and/or diminished emotional expressions.

Psychotic Disorder - a group of disorders marked by unusual ideas, distorted perceptions, and a loss of contact with reality.

Symptoms of Schizophrenia

Positive symptoms: describe the presence, or addition, of atypical behaviors or perceptions

• hallucinations and delusions

Negative Symptoms: describe the absence, or subtraction, of typical behaviors or perceptions

• diminished facial expressions and decreased speech

Disorganized symptoms: incoherent behaviors.

• Staying frozen/immobile and mimicking others speech

Hallucinations and Delusions

hallucination - a false perception, often hearing or seeing things that are not there, that may accompany psychotic disorders.

• “I’m hearing the voice of the devil” - probably a serial killer

most common hallucination are hearing voices

Delusions - a false belief, often of persecution or grandeur, that may accompany psychotic disorders.

• “The CIA is out to get me” - probably JFK

Disorganized thinking may be caused by a breakdown in selective attention

Disorganized Speech

Jumbled ideas may make no sense even within sentences, forming what is known as word salad.

Disorganized Motor Behavior

Some people with schizophrenia experience catatonia, characterized by motor behaviors ranging from a physical stupor (remaining motionless for hours), to senseless, compulsive actions (such as continually rocking or rubbing an arm), to severe agitation.

Diminished Outward Emotional Expression

Exhibit fewer emotions than are typical

• Their facial expressions may be muted, and this flat affect may suggest that their ability to experience emotions is diminished.

  • Is this true though?

And in their everyday lives, people with schizophrenia report similar levels of emotion to people with no psychiatric history

More likely to express socially inappropriate emotions

Onset and Development of Schizophrenia

24 million people have Schizophrenia

Onset happens in when young people enter adulthood (25-ish)

Men tend to be diagnosed more often than women, and to be struck earlier and with more severity

Chronic Schizophrenia is harder to fully recover from

• Social Withdrawal

• Social anhedonia, the lack of pleasure in social interactions, is a related symptom

Understanding Schizophrenia

Brain Features

Does schizophrenia have a biological key?

An excess number of dopamine receptors were found in schizophrenics after their death

• high level of dopamine may intensify brain signals in schizophrenia, creating positive symptoms such as hallucinations and paranoia

  • drugs that block dopamine receptors often lessen the positive symptoms of schizophrenia, such as delusions or hallucinations

People with Schizophrenia also often have cognitive difficulties

• Reduced activity in the frontal lobe

• unusual corpus callosum

Fluid-filled brain cavities called ventricles become enlarged; cerebral tissue also shrinks

• The greater the shrinkage, the greater the disorder

Prenatal Environment and Risk

low birth weight, mother’s diabetes, father’s older age, and lack of oxygen during delivery are all risks

External Maternal Stress also plays a role

• A large Israeli study showed that maternal exposure to terror attacks during pregnancy doubled children’s risk of schizophrenia

Might a mid-pregnancy viral infection impair fetal brain development?

• evidence suggest that fetal-virus infections contribute to the development of schizophrenia.

Genetics and Risk

Why are only some people at risk for it?

The roughly 1-in-270 lifetime odds of any person being diagnosed with schizophrenia become about 1 in 10 among those who have a sibling or parent with the disorder

Identical twins also share a prenatal environment. So, is it possible that shared germs as well as shared genes produce identical twin schizophrenia similarities?

• Sharing a placenta raises the odds of later sharing a schizophrenia diagnosis.

Children adopted by someone who develops schizophrenia do not “catch” the disorder

• Only at a higher risk if their biological parent has it

Influenced by many genes interacting with each other

Eating Disorders, Personality Disorders, and Dissociative Disorders

Eating Disorders

Anorexia Nervosa - an eating disorder in which a person (most often an adolescent girl) maintains a starvation diet (often despite being significantly underweight), and has an inaccurate and negative body self-perception (also called body dysmorphia); sometimes accompanied by excessive exercise.

Bulimia Nervosa - an eating disorder in which a person’s binge eating (usually of large amounts of high-calorie foods) is followed by weight-loss-promoting behavior, such as vomiting, laxative use, fasting, or excessive exercise.

Binge Eating Disorder - an eating disorder in which a person has significant binge-eating episodes, followed by distress, disgust, or guilt, but without the behavior to compensate that marks bulimia nervosa.

2.6 million Americans have an eating disorder

Understanding Eating Disorders

Identical twins share these disorders more often than do fraternal twins — with 50 to 60 percent heritability for anorexia

Environment matters.

• Families of those with anorexia tend to be competitive, high-achieving, and protective

• people with eating disorders often have low self-esteem, feel body dissatisfaction, set impossible personal standards, and ruminate about falling short of expectations and how others perceive them

Ideal body shape changes across culture and time

Today’s culture sends a message that “fat is bad”

Most people diagnosed with an eating disorder improve

Personality Disorders

Personality Disorders - a group of disorders characterized by enduring inner experiences or behavior patterns that differ from the person’s cultural norms and expectations, are pervasive and inflexible, begin in adolescence or early adulthood, and cause significant distress or impairment.

Antisocial Personality Disorder - a personality disorder in which a person exhibits a lack of conscience for wrongdoing, even toward friends and family members; may be aggressive and ruthless or a clever con artist.

• More prevalent in men than women

• Antisocial behavior often subsided after adolescence

• experience social challenges and have a lower emotional intelligence

Understanding Antisocial Personality disorder

both biological and psychological

Twin and adoption studies reveal that genetic relatives of people with antisocial and unemotional tendencies are at increased risk for antisocial behavior

Nature and nurture

The cortex, which may help regulate strong feelings, is smaller and thinner in people with antisocial criminal tendencies

fall far below normal in aspects of thinking, such as planning, organization, and inhibition

the traits such as fearlessness and dominance (if channeled into positive directions) can lead to athletic stardom, adventurism, or courageous heroism

Dissociative Disorders

Dissociative Disorders - a controversial, rare group of disorders involving a disconnection (dissociation) between the person’s conscious awareness and their memory, identity, emotion, perception, and behavior.

Dissociative Identity Disorder

Dissociative Identity Disorder - a rare dissociative disorder in which a person exhibits two or more distinct and alternating identities. (Formerly called multiple personality disorder.)

Understanding DID

Between 1930 and 1960, the number of North American DID diagnoses was 2 per decade. By the 1980s, when the DSM contained the first formal code for this disorder, the number had exploded to more than 20,000

Disorder is less prevalent outside of North America

Some people are skeptical

• Don’t we act like different persons depending on who we are with (friends vs boss)

• Psychiatrists can often “go fishing” for multiple identities which can lead to people acting out on their fantasies

Other people believe it is a real disorder

• They cite findings of distinct brain and body states associated with differing identities

• Dissociation is found in other disorders such as anxiety, depression and schizophrenia

Some clinicians include dissociative disorders under the umbrella of posttraumatic stress disorder as a natural, protective response to traumatic experiences during childhood

Neurodevelopmental Disorders

Neurodevelopmental Disorders - a broad category that includes developmental differences of the central nervous system (usually in the brain) that start in childhood and affect thinking and behavior.

Autism Spectrum Disorder

Autism Spectrum Disorder - a disorder that appears in childhood and is marked by limitations in communication and social understanding, and by intensely fixated interests and repetitive behaviors.

An umbrella that covers a spectrum of different variability

1 in 31 kids in the US has ASD

Researchers are debating whether autistic people have an atypical theory of mind

Gets diagnosed in every 4 boys for 1 girl

underdiagnosis of ASD among young people of color in general and Black youth in particular

biological factors contribute to ASD

• Prenatal factors such as maternal infection, toxins, psychiatric drug use, or hormones

• Heritability of ASD is near 80%

• No single autism gene

Why is reading/recognizing faces hard with people with Autism

• The underlying cause seems to be poor communication among brain regions that typically work together to let us take another’s viewpoint.

• ASD-related genes interacting with the environment

• They can make friends, but find it hard to emotionally relate to them

Childhood vaccines have no connection to autism!

Neurodiversity - differences in thoughts and behaviors, such as in ASD or ADHD, as part of an expected variation from the general (neurotypical) population; may present strengths as well as challenges.

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder - a psychological disorder marked by extreme inattention and/or hyperactivity and impulsivity.

ADHD is often described as “a disorder of self-regulation”

Diagnosis and treatment, often with a combination of cognitive-behavioral therapy and stimulant drugs, have helped many

Intellectual Developmental Disorder

Intellectual Developmental Disorder - a disorder indicated by an intelligence test score of 70 or below and difficulty adapting to the demands of life.

Multiple different types of IDD (down syndrome)

Must meet two criteria:

1. An intelligence test score indicating performance in the lowest 3 percent of the population — about 70 or below

2. Difficulty adapting to the typical demands of independent living, as expressed in three skills:

   1. conceptual (language, reading, and concepts of money, time, and number)

   2. social (interpersonal skills, being socially responsible, following basic rules and laws, and avoiding being victimized)

   3. practical (health and personal care, occupational skill, and travel)