Chapter 15: Psychological Disorders

When trying to determine abnormality, clinicians generally place more weight impairment in daily functioning
The DSM has been criticized for all-or-nothing way it defines disorders. The DSM adopts a categorial model of psychopathology

An Unpleasant emotional state that involves feelings of worry, dread, apprehension, and tension, along with heightened physical arousal, is called anxiety.
The most common category of psychological disorders are anxiety disorders
A phobia is a strong, irrational fear that is triggered by a particular object or situation.
A long-lasting anxiety disorder that develops in response to being exposed to a severe and often life threatening trauma is called post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)

When a person is driven to perform repetitive behaviors in a particular sequence or pattern, he or she is said to be experiencing a compulsion.

In studying the brains of people diagnosed with anxiety disorders, scientists have found that amygdala to be overactive and the prefrontal cortex to be under active.

Major Depression is often called “the common cold” of phycological disorders.
Bipolar disorder used to be officially called manic depression and is still often referred to by that term.
Research has shown that both major depression and bipolar disorder tend to run in families.

People with personality disorders often display the characteristics of their personality disorder by the adolescent or early adult years.
The personality disorders most likely to be self-destructive and threaten to self mutilate or commit suicide is borderline personality disorders.

Schizophrenia- A severe psychological disorder in which a person exhibits bizarre disturbances in thinking, perception, and behavior.
The most common type of schizophrenia is the paranoid type

Severe abuse or trauma is a common experience of individuals diagnosed with dissociative disorders
One important reason why some psychologists are skeptical of dissociative identity disorder is that the number of reported cases has increased dramatically in recent decades.