Lecture 1 - Introduction PDF

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What is psychopathology? Mental disorder: Diagnosis: labels that we give to each category Purpose of diagnostic systems Improve those diagnostic systems: variety of different problems Etiology: cause, setup, causes, or manner of causation of a disease or condition of a form of psychopathology Experimental psychopathology: trying to understand the etiology of these forms of psychopathology: how did this dysfunction arise? What do a lot of different forms of psychopathology have in common when it comes to ideology? Why do we need to define mental illness? Very difficult to try to arbitrate the controversies over what makes certain things a disorder and what does not: People who would argue that we shouldn't define it: constructs that we create and that we use to define actually exist to kind of undergird the authority of psychologists and psychiatrists and to stigmatize people Abnormal psychology: serves no other function than to single people out Many people would argue that definition is useful: see how and what fits within that construct; makes it easier to form hypotheses; makes it easier to try to develop treatments. → Definition helps but only to some extent Arguments about the boundaries of every definition (ex: aggression alone is not a form of psychopathology but it may be a feature of some different disorders) What is psychopathological? Abnormal behavior alone is not something we would call psychopathological; Is statistical deviance enough to call it psychopathology? Most people would agree that it is not Structures that people put in place to try to measure psychopathology: First typically medical models: Thomas Szasz (British physician from the 1600s) was noting that physical diseases were measurable entities, they express themselves as clusters of symptoms correlated with one another and have a uniform course overtime Evolved over time away from the syndrome model but we acknowledge illness as multifactorial: every disease doesn’t have a single origin or a single etiological source, and is not characterized by a single symptom Emil Kraeplin: first to apply this idea in the field of mental health; still working with this conceptualisation today, idea that distinct forms of mental illness are defined like a syndrome where we have clusters of correlated symptoms present together Underlying this model is the idea that mental disorders are what we call taconic in nature: mental disorders are categories that exist in the real world rather than merely in the minds of clinicians

and researchers; depression is an entity in the same way that chicken pox is a categorical, recognizable disease. That idea is not actually that well supported by most of our data Jerome Wakefield's 1992 article: mental disorder on the boundary between biological facts and social values Psychopathology as harmful dysfunction (Wakefield): Organ system performing contrary to its design: thinking and emotion regulation and problems with those kinds of functions would be dysfunctions, indicators of a disorder: biological component Not working at the peak of its design: athletes, geniuses, artists… statistical deviance is not enough to define psychopathology Having dysfunction alone is not enough to call someone psychopathological: Presumes that we actually understand the function and the design of the human brain or of personalities, or of emotions better than we actually do, tends to try to root psychopathology in an evolutionary context What is adaptive varies across different human contexts, dangerous to pretend that how we define psychopathology is not bound by societal norms: that’s how homosexuality ended up being classified as a mental illness in our diagnostic system for many years Idea of harmful and harm: Doesn't need to be subjectively perceived, the harm has to cause problems within the individual’s own environmental context Social component, has to cause impairment Scott Lilienfeld (professor of psychology at Emory University): Questioned quite strongly the idea of what is a natural function: natural function of an organ is not that simple, hard to distinguish between things that are adaptively neutral byproducts (don’t increase chances of survival or reproduction, ex: culture), and secondary adaptations in evolution Natural selection depends on variability, very few traits that we observe in the world are qualitative: either you have it or you don't have it, makes it very difficult to lay down boundaries to determine when something is normal versus not normal functioning Some disorders may represent adaptations, not maladaptations: some people have argued that anxiety and depression are evolutionarily adaptive (signals that individuals should give up attempts in situations where they cannot cope or where effort would be fruitless, a reasonable response to an impossible environment Thomas Widiger (University of Kentucky): Studies personality: psychopathology and mental disorders as constructs, not directly observable or definable Need a multimodal approach (no single set of measurements or definitions can entirely capture these constructs) Seeks to remind us that we are measuring something that cannot be directly observed, defining psychopathology is an ongoing iterative bootstrapping process

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Sum of all environmental influences in addition to the activity of things like susceptibility genes: identification of a single ideological source difficult Expressed across multiple domains: self reports, brain function, neural responses, physiological and behavioral responses, sometimes these are related to one another but not always...