Module 41: Basic Concepts of Psychological Disorders (Tues 11/18/25) Class 18

We have.

Have to do with psychological disorders and everything.

Yes.

I have a question.

Are we do we have class this upcoming Tuesday?

Is it on the calendar that classes are canceled on Tuesday?

How many of your classes have been canceled for next week?

All of them except this one.

We have class.

You know, I've been here 21 years.

I believe that I canceled class once in advance.

I believe that that's the case.

I have to go back and look.

We haven't been on campus for that whole time.

We were at blackboard before.

They have to look.

So it's very frustrating because, you know, I try to, you know, do the classes as scheduled.

I know there's all sorts of things that happen.

The Thanksgiving travel season is a night.

So Mondays are scattered in terms of the attendance.

Tuesday I imagine is going to be even more problematic, especially since it's the end of the day.

So if I'm here with two of you, I'll be here with two of you and we'll have fun.

I'll bring donuts.

I usually bring munchkins or something just in appreciation for people being here.

So that's just, I don't know, I will say the very first semester that I was here, I was teaching Tuesday.

Thursday I had an exam at like 8:30 or 8:00 clock in the morning on Tuesdays.

And as it came to be about a week before that date, students said, are we still having this aim on Tuesday?

I said, yeah, why wouldn't we?

Because we're not here.

And I thought I made a great mistake in the schedule.

So I know I should learn to expect that.

But I deliberately don't schedule exams on a Monday or Tuesday before Thanksgiving.

So at least I don't do that.

But I learned not how to deliver.

Okay, all right, so we're going to talk about psychological disorders module.

So yes, we do have class psychological disorders, a bunch of them, as you'll see, not all of them.

It would be impossible.

We don't even talk about all of them in that normal site.

There's not enough time.

But so we have disorders and then we have their treatment.

So if you have questions about the treatment of the disorders, we'll talk about that the last couple of modules.

Okay, all right, so a couple of important things.

So most of the modules besides this one, this is just an introductory module, have the same kind of organization.

So this module, this is what we talk about in this particular about what psychological disorders are.

Just sort of understanding general causal factors to psychological disorders, some issues with classifying disorders, just the general issue of risk of harm to self and others.

And then kind of the rates of psychological disorders.

The other disorders generally follow this kind of organization.

What the diagnostic criteria, sort of the general symptoms are, the rates of a disorder, and then understanding psychological stories in a sense of what the causal factors are.

I will say that I don't really require that students understand all of the statistics related to psychological disorders because you can really sort of get hung up on what percent of people this and how much change and so forth.

And that ends up being, when you take it together, all of the different psychological stories we talk about.

There are a lot of information to remember, but I think in the long run doesn't really do us much good in terms of understanding.

So I don't have people understand really statistics as it relates to this.

Again, treatment prevention is covered in modules of 4749, but we're only going to cover 47 and 49, not 48.

All right?

So an important understanding of psychological disorders at this point should be that we're only going to learn a fraction of what there is to know about psychological disorders.

A lot of times you take an introductory psychology course and then you think that you have all the information to understand psychological disorders, to diagnose yourself, to diagnose others, perhaps.

And that is not even close to the truth.

Especially when you're taking an introductory abnormal psych course.

You don't really have sufficient information.

That being said, you might have something might sort of spark in your head in terms of something you've never thought about before in terms of yourself and so forth.

And it doesn't mean that.

It doesn't mean, you know, that you shouldn't pursue it by speaking with someone about why, I never thought that I could have that.

But certainly don't diagnose yourself because of what you learn, the little information you learn.

I say that psychology student syndrome might be analogous to what we call medical school student syndrome.

I don't know if that applies to nurses.

I don't know if it applies.

You can decide if it applies there as well.

Certainly a lot less expensive.

Expensive to have this issue when you're general psych in the intro to, you know, getting a BA degree as opposed to getting an advanced degree, especially in medicine.

So we'll just leave that.

So some other things to keep in mind here.

Some other things to keep in mind is that we're really only going to kind of talk about the source that we do talk about.

You're only going to talk about a little bit of information about each of those.

So the criteria for diagnosis in our textbook really is what we just talked about, a couple of handful of symptoms each of those disorders we talked about, which is really limited.

I try to expand on that at least a little bit, but I try to add some information that I think is important that may be left out of the textbook, but certainly not everything.

A lot of times the criteria for most disorders require a certain number of listed symptoms for the diagnosis.

And textbook doesn't really talk about that.

It doesn't say, might list off five different symptoms, but they don't say there's actually 10 different symptoms and you have to have two of them, plus, you know, some of the other ones in order to be diagnosed with a disorder.

How many of you have seen the diagnostic instances of any more preventive disorders?

I have it in my office.

It might be at home, but I might have it in my office.

That's actually the official sort of diagnostic book for psychologists and psychiatrists.

The diagnosis for some diagnoses, you have some symptoms that are sort of optional and some that are required.

The frequency and intensity of symptoms is really important.

This is really very important to understand about what is kind of typical among people when they're experiencing, let's say, anxiety, what sort of quote unquote normal anxiety.

And then what's anxiety that kind of rises to the level that is actually a disorder, because anxiety is a very, very common kind of experience.

But it doesn't mean that if you have it, it means you have a disorder.

The frequency that you have these symptoms and the intensity of the symptoms and how much they actually impact your life in some ways occupationally social, other important areas of functioning as basically for almost every diagnosis.

And with dsm, it's important to understand how it affects your life in a major way.

There's some interesting exceptions that we won't talk about, but for the most part it has to affect your way in a major real life in a major way.

Any questions about that?

So psychological floors of syndrome or symptoms of flesh of more flight and pre significant disservice to individuals cognition, emotion regulation or behavior.

And generally we talk about the symptoms being chronic, distressing and disruptive.

And just to give you a little bit of information about, just to understand diagnosis in the context of the time we live, because there's a lot of diagnoses that we realized in the past were kind of ridiculous, that we consider them to be diagnoses.

And there will be diagnoses in the future that we have now that we will consider absolutely ridiculous.

I can't believe we thought that that was a psychological misfortune.

So to give you an example of where this might come in, something called Draketomania, sort of the overwhelming urge to run away was often given to slaves who tried to run away back in the 60s, 1600s, 1700s.

So if they tried to run away, they were diagnosed with this mental disorder of trying to run away, that there was something wrong with that.

If you think that that is absolutely absurd.

It is absurd.

There was also another disorder which I cannot pronounce.

It's something like dysenthesia, antiphopia or something like that.

It's essentially the unexplainable wealth that slaves would have on their bodies.

Like that was A disorder like they just appeared like the unexplainable wealth that they had on their body.

It's really absolutely absurd to think that that was considered a disorder, but it was at one time.

So we will find things today that we find probably, maybe not equally absurd, but somewhat absurd that we consider a disorder today.

Does it mean to think that everything that we say is a disorder problem, but, you know, something in 100 years from that will look kind of very, very bizarre, and it doesn't look put that way today.

So in terms of understanding psychological disorders, Justin said that sort of a couple of models here.

The disease model of psychological disorders is this model that there are generally sort of physical causes that can be diagnosed, treated, and in many cases cured, often from treatment in a hospital.

There's been more resurgence of the medical model with discoveries of things like genetically influenced brain structures and biochemical abnormalities, fetal mental illness.

And so we see this model often very common in psychiatry and so forth.

Some areas of psychology, we have certain.

I call them necessary competing models, but we have models that are a little bit more integrated, where we understand the biological influences, but we also take into account psychological influences, social, cultural influences in terms of developing psychological disorders.

You know, vulnerability, stress.

Models essentially say that we inherit a biological kind of predisposition for a particular disorder.

And then things in our environment can sort of set them off.

Psychological, kind of social, cultural, and so forth.

We talked about the DSM being the main sort of diagnostic tool for clinicians, generally psychologists and psychiatrists.

But we know that social workers, we know that other folks will also use this manual as well.

The first one is 1952.

The most recent one is in 2000.

This is what they look like.

Some strengths of the.

Some strengths of sort of diagnosis of the dsm.

When you have a diagnosis, it sort of assumes that you understand what the kind of.

Some of the symptoms might be.

And so instead of someone communicating like, well, my patient has a runny nose and they feel run down, they have a slight fever or whatever, you know, we can say something like, well, they have a cold or they have a viral infection or something like that.

It's a lot easier when you compare the name to it.

It's easier for client and practitioners to talk with each other.

Practitioner, Practitioner.

It helps predict future course of the disorder.

You know, when we know kind of what something is, we can research it.

We can.

We can know from that research what kind of treatment we might have for that particular disorder.

And promise research.

We can now look up research when you're just Talking about clusters of symptoms, it's a lot harder to even look up are other people researching this.

But when we have a name for it, you can even find other people doing this kind of research.

And then it's somewhat surprising when you get a diagnosis, if you have just a bunch of symptoms going on, you don't know what it is.

It's very unsettling for people, right?

You just, you haven't, you know, you don't feel well in all different ways.

The only symptoms, but no one can tell you what it is when you get that label, when you get that diagnosis.

There's something comforting about knowing that it has a name to it, right?

Because you have the name to it.

You can now connect to other people who have the same problem, right?

Before that, you have no idea what's going on.

You can't make any connections to folks because there's no name.

It's very, very vague.

Once you get that name with the diagnosis, it often brings along the leak to folks and helps connect them to support systems.

In terms of some of the limitations here, the DSM and these colors are not correct.

It's the only kind of representation of this I could actually find.

But the colors are actually not correct, which is really muted.

But there's mixed diagnostics reliability at the dsm.

So for some disorders there, you know, if you have one clinician make the diagnosis, you're likely to get another clinician to make the same diagnosis.

That's, you know, high reliability.

A lot of disorders, there's not that much reliability.

We look at Generalized Anxiety disorder, which we're going to talk about first in our next module.

That one has very limited agreement among clinicians.

One more person diagnosis, it's not likely another clinician is going to diagnose the same thing.

Personality disorders are the same example.

We also think a lot of people feel that the DSM over pathologizes normal symptoms.

So things that are anything that sort of can happen seems to be like it can be in the DSM nowadays.

So we have even something related to grief that's a disorder.

Grief is a very common experience people have.

But now it's sort of entering itself into abnormality in the DSM in ways that it had not before.

And then diagnosis and just simple labeling be biased and lead to stigma.

We know that from research.

We know that once a person has a diagnosis, people look at them differently, right?

People expect the same behavior in someone who doesn't have the diagnosis is looked at very differently at someone who does have the diagnosis.

So none of that.

It affects people's perception of people just to have a diagnosis.

Does that make sense to folks?

Have you heard about the.

You know what?

I'm not going to talk with Rosen.

Have you heard about the Rosenhan Hospital study?

It was just, it's an early study from 1972 where he tried to prove the point that diagnosis was really problematic in terms of labeling.

He sort of proved that.

There's a lot of, a lot of controversy about the particular study in terms of fraud and so forth.

But we know from other research that came after that that people are looked at very differently when they do have a psychological diagnosis.

Okay, so suicide.

There's a little bit about suicide and self harm in our textbook.

We see a very high number, certainly worldwide that commit suicide.

We talk a lot about the rate among teens and there is a substantial increase in the United States, you know, since 2009, or between 2009 and 2020.

But most people don't realize that the highest rate of suicide, you know, what.

What group has the highest rate of suicide in terms of age and gender?

Especially elderly males.

Elderly males have the highest rate of suicide in our country.

We know that anxiety and depression substantially increase the risk of suicide.

But actually, almost any psychological disorder has an association with suicide.

So for example, schizophrenia has a very high rate of suicide.

People usually think it's related to major depressive disorder or bipolar disorder.

Yes, there's a high risk there.

But lots of the psychological disorders are associated with suicide.

Schizophrenia, some of the anxiety disorders, some of the eating disorders have high rates of suicidality and so forth.

We see other increased risk for things like unemployment, confederate goals, if there's a gun in the house, and social isolation, some warning signs.

One of the things I want to really point out that is important is this is.

Most of this is common knowledge to folks.

If it's not, you have it here.

But the idea that if someone talks about suicide that they're not likely to commit suicide, that is completely, unequivocally false.

Right.

If someone talks about it, people who talk about it have often committed suicide, attempted suicide, or actually committed suicide.

And folks who think that, you know, that's, you know, they're really just not.

If they're going to do it, they're going to do it.

They're never going to say anything about it.

There's a very small percentage of suicides that that's probably the case.

But most people give some sort of sign to folks that they're struggling and so they will talk about it or Say something about it in some way, shape or form.

So don't make the assumption that if someone talks about it that they're not actually going to go through with it.

This is some information that I have checked the links.

I checked them to make sure that they were okay.

If you have concerns about someone in terms of imminent danger, again she would call safety of God.

But there are, you know, other sources here besides our counseling center, especially if you're off campus where you can talk to someone denying the suicide line crisis light line is available.

That's specifically for suicidality crises.

Has anyone seen some of the billboards for this?

So a billboard on 787 a long time ago that was sort of taken down not long time ago, maybe a year ago.

Saw the 988 billboard.

I didn't think it was 988 at first because it said all it said was need to talk or 988.

What's your impression of that?

This is a suicide and crisis lifeline.

And this big billboard on 787 said need to talk called 988.

I think it was up for maybe two months.

What do you think about that billboard representing the suicidal crisis?

Oh my.

Think about an 8 year old in the back with her cell phone, her car driving a 787.

Right.

Need to talk doesn't represent one of you in crisis.

Right.

I kind of wondered what the impact of that was in the Buffalo 988.

That doesn't sound like it sort of matches.

I was just curious if anyone had seen that billboard.

I just was very interested in kind of the effects of that billboard on that particular.

Non suicidal self injury.

These are not folks who are typically trying to hurt to film itself.

Although it is a risk for later suicide attempts.

There are all sorts of reasons for this that people do this.

And so the textbook does differentiate between suicidal attempts and non suicidal injuries.

Being able to understand dangerousness is a long standing issue in in mental health care and otherwise is trying to figure out who might be violent, who might be at risk for violence.

It's important to understand that most men, all this people who are mentally ill are not violent.

Most violent criminals are not actually mentally ill.

But if you predict this it's usually alcohol, drug use, some combination of alcohol, drug use, psychosis that includes some sort of commanding hallucination and or threatening delusion, gun availability, impulsivity, including from what we call serious or repeated head injury.

So you ever heard about the traumatic brain injuries that you see in some sports?

Have you Heard about this, right?

And then the behavior problems that come for some of those folks afterwards.

Sometimes there's a lot of depression involved, there's a lot of impulsivity involved.

And so we see suicidality and violent behavior often in those cases where people have had serious brain injuries.

So we don't often make that connection.

But understanding that background is important to really look at someone's possibility for impulsivity if they've had previous violent behavior ending a young male.

These are all predictors of the rates of psychological disorders.

This is some selected disorders that the textbook decided to kind of throw at us.

In terms of in the past year, the percentage of people that adults that actually have these particular disorders.

You see depressive and bipolar disorders have the highest rate in our.

In our country.

We will talk about all of these actually in our class.

Globally, about 1 billion people affected by malaria disorders.

And one year adult, her pregnancy rate is actually 19%.

If we combine everything together, this increases the risk in terms of protective factors.

It's a protective factor here.

I think our textbooks by and large don't do as good of a job talking about protective factors.

We talked about sort of treatment and so forth.

But 50% women disorder develops into teens, of course, by their mid-20s.

I have this International alliance of mental illness.

I have this graphic that represents that.

I wondered why they used a baseball graphic since every semester student has come up with their data status.

So 75% of all lifetime mental health conditions begin by age 24.

Why do they use a baseball tab?

I've been trying to figure this out for years.

I wouldn't know why.

What would be represented by this?

The only thing I think of is that you're safe by the age 24.

I have no idea what this means.

I've been trying to figure this out for a really long time.

I don't know.

Okay.

All right.

So in terms of this module ratio of 1, just specifically rates and statistics relate to psychological suicide.

And this is also true for their mating model.

I'm not going to ask you what percent of people have this.

You know, what percent of males versus females have this?

I'm not going to ask those kind of rates on our exam, our last exam.

Just understand that for all of the modules that are upcoming.

Any questions about this module?