Question

Examine psychopathology that may occur over the life span. Directions: Describe one common disorder found in each age group: infants, children, adolescents, and adults. (You will be describing four disorders in all.) Using the diathesis-stress model, describe how the gene-environment interactions explain why people get these illnesses.

Answer 1

• Vulnerability could aid in understanding the causes of psychopathology.
• Vulnerability can be defined as having a degree of stability and permanence that resides within the individual as an endogenous trait. Biological and environmental stress could then act on the vulnerable individual, resulting in symptoms or disorders.
• Anxiety disorders can be found in in each of these groups in various forms.
• During infancy,babie do show some vulnerability and fearful response to loud noise or the sudden loss of physical support.
• Some degree of separation anxiety can develop in infants and young children like pre-schoolers when they have positive attachments with their caregivers.
• Some children can have temperament of being irritable and clingy as infants, have more trouble establishing a regular daily schedule, and have more difficulty with transitions. They may be more vulnerable to separation anxiety. Such a child may require more work and attention.
• For toddlers or infants, those who have had either very few or very frequent separations from loved ones experience the most separation anxiety.
• During late childhood a child can develop performance anxiety social phobia can get developed in adolescence.
• Adolescents Adults both can develop obessive complusive disorder. Most individuals with OCD, even young ones, are at least somewhat aware that their symptoms do not make logical sense. However, young children are less capable of abstract thought, so their level of awareness about their symptoms may not be as good. But adults do have the cognitive ability to understand that their symptoms do not make any sense and can seek therapy on their own.
• Depression is another condition that is commonly found in children,adolescents and adults.
• Amongst children and teenagers risk factors could be the family environment or school performance.
• Children and young adults who experience bullying at school or universities can develop major depressive disorder.
• The risk of school failure and suicide is quite high in depressed children and adolescents, a close collaboration with a mental health professional is often necessary.
• Diathesis-stress model helps in explaining the gene-environment interaction in developing various mental illnesses including annxiety disorders.
• It focuses upon the vulnerability factor in individuals.It talks about the relationship between potential causes of depression, and the degree to which people may be vulnerable to react to those causes. It describes that people have, to different degrees, vulnerabilities or predispositions for developing depression.
• It explains that if the person's inherent vulnerability is high for developing depression, the less environmental stress will be required to cause him or her to become depressed.
• In contrast, if someone has a less vulnerability factor for becoming depressed, it will take greater levels of environmental stress in order to produce the disorder.
• Stress can caused by various life events,like losing a loved,performing badly in school,loss of a job,marriage,divorce etc, For every individual the stressor would be different.
• Schizophrenia can also be explained by this model,family studies have suggested depending upon the degree of vulnerability in individuals,high or low combined with environmental and psychosocial factors can develop this illness.