ABNORMAL BEHAVIOR IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT

• The term "mental illness" is used to describe the psychological, emotional, or behavioral problems that people experience.
• Psychological dysfunction


  A breakdown in cognitive, emotional, or behavioral functioning
• Psychological disorder


  A psychological disorder is a psychological dysfunction within an individual associated with distress or impairment in functioning and a response that is not typical or culturally expected
• Normal and Abnormal Dysfunction are hard to define
• Dysfunction is not enough to meet the criteria for psychological disorder
• These problems are often considered to be on a continuum or a dimension rather than to be categories that are either present or absent
• Emotions


  • If you experience severe fear all evening and just want to go home, even though there is nothing to be afraid of, and the severe fear happens on every date
• A social standard of normal has been misused
• The most widely accepted definition used in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.; DSM-5; American Psychiatric Association, 2013)
• Productivity in the eyes of society

  The more productive you are, the more eccentricities society will tolerate
• Abnormal

  Occurs infrequently
• Clinical descriptions

  • Presenting problems
  • Clinical
  • Prevalence
  • Course
  • Prognosis
• Clinical

  Refers to the types of problems or disorders found in a clinic or hospital and to the activities connected with assessment and treatment
• Course

  Refers to how long a disorder lasts. Chronic course lasts a long time, sometimes a lifetime; e.g., Mood disorders have an episodic course. Includes acute onset (begin suddenly) and insidious onset (develop gradually over an extended period)
• Atypical or not culturally expected

  Important but insufficient to determine if a disorder is present by itself
• Deviation from the average

  The greater the deviation, the more abnormal it is
• Social norms

  Your behavior is disordered if you are violating them
• It is difficult to define what constitutes a psychological disorder, and the debate continues
• This definition can be useful across cultures and subcultures if we pay careful attention to what is functional or dysfunctional (or out of control) in a given society. But it is never easy to decide what represents dysfunction
• Presenting problems

  A patient “presents” with a specific problem or set of problems
• Prevalence

  Statistics on how many new cases occur during a given period, such as a year, represent the incidence of the disorder. Includes sex ratio, age of onset, which often differs from one disorder to another
• Prognosis

  Refers to the individual seeking treatment and taking appropriate steps