Question

Define and explain the principle of psychological disorders

Answer 1

• Abnormality must be judged in the context of a particular social situation.
• The general principle applies to behaviour across different cultures. Actions that are normal,expected and accepted in one culture may be considered deviant in another.
• Psychological disorders also cause distress in others because the behaviour deviates from the social norms.
• The empirical approach is often linked to behavioural assessment and often relies on factor analysis.
• The clinical-consensual approach includes experts,clincians who work with disturbed people,try to reach a consensus about which psychological disorders exist and how these disorders should be defined and diagnosed. The consensus is based on the experience and judgment of the experts rather than statistical procedures.
• Psychological disorders were viewed from a supernatural perspective: attributed to a force beyond scientific understanding. Those afflicted were thought to be practitioners of black magic or possessed by spirits and exorcism was used widely.
• The biological perspective views psychological disorders as linked to biological phenomena, such as genetic factors, chemical imbalances, and brain abnormalities. Neural imaging technology nelps in identifying the brain structures involved in psychological disorders.
• The diathesis-stress model focues on both biological and psychosocial factors to predict the likelihood of a disorder.
• It suggests that people with an underlying predisposition for a disorder i.e. a diathesis are more likely than others to develop a disorder when faced with adverse environmental or psychological events i.e stress, such as childhood maltreatment, negative life events, trauma, and so on.
• A diathesis is not always a biological vulnerability to an illness; some diatheses may be psychological for example, a tendency to think about life events in a pessimistic a way.
• Freudian's psychodynamic perspective focus on the unconscious and unresolved conflicts that develop anxiety in an individual leading to development of disorder. Psychosis is developing abnormality that is away from reality.
• The behavioural perspective focuses on the importance of learning. Abnormal behaviour is developed from faulty or ineffective learning or conditioning.
• In the cognitive perspective, people engage in abnormal behavior because of particular thoughts and behaviors that are often based upon their false assumptions and develop maladaptive behaviours that culminate into psychological disorders.
• From the social‐cultural perspective, abnormal behavior is learned within a social context ranging from the family, to the community, to the culture. For example,eating disorders of Bulimia or Anorexia nervosa are found mostly in Western cultures, which value the thin female body.