Week 2, Lecture 1

Why do people seek out help?

In distress, not sleeping, not motivated to do tasks, something doesn’t feel right, feeling as though they are out of place or don’t belong…

• Maybe external entity like partner or parents forces you to go - why? they’re never the problem (sarcasm), see the kid is suffering so they send them to therapy and wanna help their kids

• Devastation and desperation (reading from class, as read by teacher).

Psychology Tip - Motivation doesn’t just come. It comes from action. You have to do something different to feel different.

How are diagnostic categories, disorders, and syndromes made?

• Exploratory factor analysis to get different clusters of symptoms

• DSM-5 we lose an entire category: aspergers.

• Pro of getting diagnosis? Insurance coverage, you can find a community, can get treatment or advice for it. Gives ppl opportunity to connect with others.

• Internet use disorder not in DSM-5, but is in ICD-11

many studies are temperamental, you can manipulate fmri with colours,

Mental illnesses are constructs.

• Constructs can be valid, but don’t exist, are not tangible, but they are great cause correlation and epxloration. We arent actually measuring the thing we think we are.

• We laugh at brain image of different parts with different ideas an emotions and feelings, but that is essentially what we try to do when we look for neurobiological underpinnnings of these biological constructs — we get to chicken or egg question (is dopamine leading to symptom, or does symptom lead to dopamine increase?)

What is Validity?

Type of validity: Depression: Anxiety

Realistic: Research linking MDD to seretonin/dopamine dysregulation or altered neural circuits: Generalized anxiety disorder

13-14 minutes is panic attack.

• Realistic validity

• Internal and external validity

• Is it measuring what it is supposed to measure?

• Instrumental validity

• Realistic validity

rELATEIVE VALIDITY- internet use disorder. age or gender based. cultural. SES too. homosecuality.

“Are subjective complaints of patients irrelevant if we cannot correlate them with specific neurobiological causes?”

• You’re suffering

• we’re bad at predicting suicidal ideation, or whether they’ll go through with it

You cannot try to do something. You make a choice to do it. “I’ll try to come to your birthday on sunday.” Depending on how I feel, I’ll go. Do or don’t there is no try.

Szasz view on mental illness —

• no issue in wanting to take care of someone, but don’t force it, don’t coerce

What is Paternalism?

• 18 years to coerce that person, after that they have free will

• Don’t have a choice, need to take care of this person

What is Anti-Psychiatry?

• Recognition that psychiatry lacks validity

• Anti-hopsitalization

• Decenter psychiatric approaches

• Thinking that it may be harmful

Is there another way to understand suffering?

• Suffering is on a spectrum

• Diagnostic model is standard way

• Day-to-day maladaptive behaviours — maladaptivity depends on context

the question of validity in psychiatry is probably not linear and should not be seen as such.

Emotion is not a disorder.

• We use emotion to protect ourselves — when we get angry, it is ultimately to survive (self-defense mechanism).

  • What if that anger leads you to perform an action that would be self-defeating? Not necessarily maladaptive. Emotion is not rational or logical.