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History of Psychopathology - Coggle Diagram
History of
Psychopathology
Early Approaches to
Studying the Mind
ancient greece
priests would also perform healing rituals. used empirical observations to understand how the body works.
hippocrates: observed contralateral control
> right side of brain controls left side of body, and vice versa.
the humours guy: blood (air), yellow bile (fire), black bile (earth-also doesn't exist), phlegm (water) > control personality.
saw mental and physical illness as having physical, not supernatural causes (biological tradition)
hysteria
: female ailment. if women didn't have intercourse, then the uterus would become misaligned, causing anxiety, irritability, and insomnia.
treated with "genital massage" to make them cum "paroxysm"
seen as really tedius to do
so many women wanted this treatment that the first vibrator was invented in 1909.
very socially acceptable. was widely thought that women couldn't feel arousal or sexual pleasure
middle ages
supernatural tradition
: the church saw mental illness as the result of being cursed or possessed by demons
16th century western europe:
"lunacy" was seen as a lifestyle choice that could be disciplined out of people.
the government began to build asylums to segregate, house, treat, and study people (mostly poor people) with mental illness.
bethlehem royal hospital "bedlam"
: continued to use humoral therapies as punishments instead of treatment.
incredibly awful conditions: abuse, overcrowding, lack of clothing.
moral therapy
: reading, music, and pleasurable activities were prescribed depending on a person's symptoms.
underfunding, understaffing, and lack of staff training meant this was rarely put into practice.
saw
exorcisms
as genuine means of healing, due to stories in the bible of jesus healing people by commanding spirits to leave them.
people with tourettes, mood disorders, and schizophrenia were restrained, burned, had their heads shaved into cross shapes, starved, and beaten.
"demonic possession" became a convenient excuse to lock up and torture anyone who wasn't socially acceptable (heretics, thieves, women)
treatment continued well into the renaissance
insanity was one of the few accepted defences against witch trial charges.
early neolithic societies
believed that mental illness was caused by spirits that invaded the head.
healers would drill a hole into the skull of the patient to release the spirit =
trepanation
.
would relieve the pressure inside the skull and the headaches it was causing
the earliest evidence comes from the skull of a 50-year-old male who survived and healed from the surgery >
ukraine 6000-7000BC
the preferred method for releasing spirits in
ancient egypt
psychological and physiological illness were seen as essentially the same thing. when people became unwell, it was thought that they had been possessed by spirits.
imhotep: physician > recognised that illness and the healing process could be better understood by oversving the results of the treatment they applied > very early empirical science.
the acquisitions of knowledge through observation
19th century
psychological tradition: mental illness as having psychological roots, like dysfunctional beliefs and thinking habits
The 20th Century
and Beyond
psychology was beginning to be seen as a legitimate branch of medicine
treatments were in the early days and had extreme side effects.
treatments
drugs
before the 20th century, drugs delivered in asylums were primarily sedatives, but in the 1950s drug treatments were beginning to be mass-produced, and were seen as a one-size-fits-all solution.
barbituates (used to feel relaxed or drowsy) like luminol were used to replace opium but were just as addictive.
between the 1930s and 1950s, new medications like lithium (still used today to treat bipolar disorder) were being invented
chlorpromazine (largactil) still used for psychosis
imipramine (first antidepressant)
once doctors realised that you could use different drugs for different disorders, psychiatry was put more in line with other branches of medicine.
drug interventions were given to virtually any patient until the 50s, even when it wasn't needed, causing distrust and a stigma of mental intervention that is still seen today.
others
lobotomy:
drilling into front of skull and cutting out bits of the frontal lobe. helped pacify violent patients, but mostly because they now had brain damage.
insulin coma therapy:
injecting a massive dose of insulin to rapidly drop blood sugar levels and induce a coma.
electroconvulsive shock therapy:
sending an electrical current into the brain to induce a seizure. changes the way certain neural and chemical systems function.
most effective treatment for people with treatment-resistant depression.
sigmund freud
believed mental illness was caused by a disruption of thoughts and emotions instead of a chemical imbalance.
psychodynamic theory:
mental health problems arise from unconscious psychological conflicts
unconscious mind: id, ego, superego
psychosexual stages, fixation, etc
used free-associated and dream analysis in therapy > resolve a person's unconscious conflicts > catharsis.
freud influenced carl jung and alfred adler, who rejected most of the sexual aspects of psychoanalytic theory.
instead encouraged people to remove social and psychological obstacles that stopped them from reaching their full potential > self-actualising
humanistic psychology
maslow and rogers
hierarchy of needs proposed by maslow
rogers: person-centered therapy > talking through problems, finding their own solutions
limited effectiveness for serious mental health concerns
aspects, like showing unconditional positive regard for the client remain important parts of modern therapy and counselling.
The Scientific
Method
behavioural psych
psychology was unscientific before pavolv's time; methods like free assocation would produce inconsistent results
low test-retest reliability
methods also heavily rely on therapist interpretation
inter-rater reliability
validity: measuring what you think you're measuring
john b. watson
> unethical experiments to see if someone can fear a previously unfeared object.
spreading of learned association is called
stimulus generalisation
fear of fluffy white rabbit spreading to anything that's fluffy and white.
exposure therapy: treatment for phobias
classical conditioning experiments were measurable and replicable
operant/instrumental conditioning
influenced by thorndike's law of effect
: the consequence of a behaviour influences whether a behaviour is performed more or less frequently in the future.
behaviour increases > reinforcement (pos + neg)
behaviour decreases > punishment (pos + neg)
pavlovian/classical conditioning
pavlov paired the sound of a bell with food
food: unconditioned stimulus
dog salivating: unconditioned response > natural biological reaction
after having enough bell/food pairings, the dogs salivated at the sound of the bell without having the food.
bell: conditioned stimulus
salivating becomes a conditioned response
conditioned responses do not continue indefinitely > extinction
designing a good experiment
case studies:
detailed account of a single person's experience
unethical to do follow-up research on the person, and unethical to replicate that person's experience, so we often don't know the true origin of their symptoms, and if their experience generalises to the rest of the population.
useful for identifying correlations (potential relationships between variables)
correlation is not the same as causation
true experiments:
used to gain better control of the many parameters that can influence results
random selection, random allocation.
double-blind:
neither researcher nor participant knows who gets the real treatment and who gets the placebo.
independent variable:
what gets manipulated by the researcher or a grouping variable
quasi-experiment:
grouping participants by naturally occurring variables (males and females, clinically depressed or not, etc)
the experimenter observes how the manipulation or natural grouping affects the facts they're measuring >
dependent variable
remove the influence of
confounding variables (other factors)
to make sure the experiment is valid.
control these variables by understanding how they affect the dependent variable.
start with a general question about psychopathology
need a reliable, valid, and replicable way to measure observations (operationalising)
operational definitions are usually formed by scientific theory
a detailed explanation of how and why a phenomenon occurs.
based on multiple empirical observations and is used to predict future occurrences of that phenomenon.
theory is used to test a hypothesis (testable prediction)
From Research
to Treatment
introspection and self-report are not always the most accurate or reliable ways to collect data. people can lie, but people can also have limited insight into how they're feeling.
research suggests that people who struggle to regulate their emotions also struggle to differentiate between similar emotions, like anger and frustration.
heightened risk of mental illness.
many techniques are used in combination to collect physiological data to build up a more detailed picture of how a person's body is responding to an experimental situation in real time.
measuring a person's heartbeat: electrocardiography (ECG):
heartrate (person's BPM), and heartrate variability (how heart rate changes over time > useful as a measure of how fast a person's emotions change over time).
facial electromyography (EMG)
measured how different facial muscles activate, and can be sued as an objective measure of emotional regulation
neuroimaging
: finding out what parts of the brain perform what function
functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI):
strong magnet used to measure oxygen levels in the blood, and build up a detailed picture of how the brain is working.
most machines have a little tv screen inside, to show specific images or videos to the participant, and then the scanner can detect how the brain responds.
sometimes also a little keypad that can be used for maths problems, reading comprehension, etc.
shows researchers how brain activity changes based on what the participant sees, and their behavioural response.
correlation between what the brain's response is to seeing an image, and the behavioural task the participant is asked to perform. researchers need to be careful not to overstate their conclusions.
need to be sure that the parts of the brain are necessary sufficient when producing behavioural responses.
often done in conjunction with self-report tests like surveys to help researchers understand what their physiological and neuroimaging data means.
carefully written and validated surveys allow researchers to obtain a standardised measure of a person's thoughts, feelings, and experiences in different situations.
analysis of mediator variables
: investigating how lots of different variables relate to each other.
how the effect of variable A influences variable B via the effect of a third variable, (mediator)
randomised control trials (RCTs)
quasi-experiments to test how effective different treatments are.
for new treatments to be considered effective, they must work better than a placebo, and ideally be better, cheaper, or have fewer side effects than current treatment options,
participants with the specified mental illness are recruited > participants are randomly assigned the new treatment or the existing treatment (TAU- treatment as usual condition) > compare these results to a control (either placebo or waiting-list control (leaving people alone to recover of their own accord)).