Deck 15: B: Psychological Disorders

Question 1

What is borderline personality disorder (BPD)? Describe the behaviours displayed by someone who has been diagnosed with BPD and discuss what explanations have been given for BPD.

Answer 1

Answers will vary but should contain the following information for full credit.
--Borderline personality disorder is a condition marked by instability in mood,identity,and impulse control.Individuals with a borderline personality disorder tend to be extremely impulsive and unpredictable,although many are married and hold down good jobs.Their relationships frequently alternate from extremes of worshipping partners one day to hating them the next.Borderline persons' impulsivity and rapidly fluctuating emotions often have a self-destructive quality: Many engage in drug abuse,sexual promiscuity,overeating,and even self-mutilation,like cutting themselves when upset.They may threaten suicide to manipulate others,reflecting the chaotic nature of their relationships.Because many of them experience intense feelings of abandonment when alone,they may jump frantically from one unhealthy relationship to another.
--Explanations of borderline personality disorder.Psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg (1967,1975)traced the roots of borderline personality to childhood problems with developing a sense of self and bonding emotionally to others.According to Kernberg,borderline individuals can't integrate differing perceptions of people,themselves included.This defect supposedly arises from an inborn tendency to experience intense anger and frustration from living with a cold,unempathic mother.Kernberg argued that borderline individuals experience the world and themselves as unstable because they tend to "split" people and experiences into either all good or all bad.Although influential,Kernberg's model of borderline personality remains inadequately researched.According to Marsha Linehan's (1993)sociobiological model,individuals with borderline personality disorder inherit a tendency to overreact to stress and experience lifelong difficulties with regulating their emotions (Crowell,Beauchaine,& Linehan,2009).Indeed,twin studies suggest that borderline personality traits are substantially heritable (Torgersen et al. ,2000).Difficulties in controlling emotions may be responsible for the rejection many individuals with borderline personality disorder encounter,as well as their concerns about being validated,loved,and accepted.Edward Selby and Thomas Joiner's emotional cascade model holds that intense rumination about negative events or emotional experiences may result in uncontrolled "emotional cascades," which prompt self-injurious actions,like cutting.Although these impulsive and desperate actions succeed in providing brief distraction from rumination,they often fuel further bouts of rumination,creating a vicious cycle of problems with regulating emotions (Selby et al. ,2009;Selby & Joiner,2009).

Question 2

What are some important criticisms of the DSM-5 as a diagnostic tool for psychological disorders? Be sure to elaborate on your answers.

Answer 2

Answers will vary but should include the following points,along with appropriate supportive discussion,for full credit.
--Some disorders are nothing more than labels for a problem rather than an informative diagnosis that adds to our knowledge about the person.
--Some people are diagnosed as suffering from multiple disorders at the same time (comorbidity),which may instead suggest that the disorders are variations on a single condition rather than true,independent diagnoses.
--The DSM is based on a categorical approach-one either has the disorder (meets the diagnostic criteria for a disorder)or does not.This means that one is either normal or abnormal (differences in kind),rather than differing in one's degree of healthy functioning (differences in degree).

Question 3

Discuss how the interpersonal,behavioural,cognitive,and learned helplessness models of depression differ.

Answer 3

Answers will vary but should contain the following information for full credit.
--Interpersonal model: Depression as a social disorder.James Coyne hypothesized that depression creates interpersonal problems (Coyne,1976;Joiner & Coyne,1999;Rudolph et al. ,2006).When people become depressed,he argued,they seek excessive reassurance,which,in turn,leads others to dislike and reject them.Depression is a vicious cycle.Depressed people often elicit hostility and rejection from others,which,in turn,maintains or worsens their depression.
Behavioural model: Depression as a loss of reinforcement.Peter Lewinsohn's (1974)behavioural model assumes that depression results from a low rate of response-contingent positive reinforcement.Put in simpler terms,when depressed people try different things and receive no payoff for them,they eventually give up.They stop participating in many pleasant activities,leaving them little opportunity to obtain reinforcement from other people.In time,their personal and social worlds shrink,as depression seeps into virtually every nook and cranny of their lives.Lewinsohn later observed that depressed people sometimes lack social skills (Segrin,2000;Youngren & Lewinsohn,1980),making it even harder for them to obtain reinforcement from others.To make matters worse,if people respond to depressed individuals with sympathy and concern,they may reinforce and maintain these individuals' withdrawal.This view implies a straightforward recipe for breaking the grip of depression: pushing ourselves to engage in pleasant activities.Sometimes merely getting out of bed can be the first step toward conquering depression.
Cognitive model: Depression as a disorder of thinking.In contrast,Aaron Beck's influential cognitive model of depression holds that depression is caused by negative beliefs and expectations (Beck,1967,1987).Beck focused on the cognitive triad,three components of depressed thinking: negative views of oneself,one's experiences,and the future.These habitual thought patterns,called negative schemas,presumably originate in early experiences of loss,failure,and rejection.Activated by stressful events in later life,these schemas reinforce depressed people's negative experiences (Scher,Ingram,& Segal,2005).Depressed people's view of the world is bleak because they put a decidedly negative mental spin on their experiences.They also suffer from cognitive distortions,that is,skewed ways of thinking.Two examples are overgeneralization and selective abstraction.People engage in overgeneralization when they draw an extremely broad conclusion on the basis of a specific fact or minor event.After receiving a parking ticket,a woman might conclude she's worthless and that nothing will ever go right for her.People engage in selective abstraction when they draw a negative conclusion based on only an isolated aspect of a situation.A man might consistently single out a trivial error he committed in a softball game and blame himself completely for the loss.It's as though depressed people were wearing glasses that filtered out all of life's positive experiences and brought all of life's negative experiences into sharper focus.
Learned helplessness: Depression as a consequence of uncontrollable events.Bruce Overmier and Martin Seligman (1967)described learned helplessness as the tendency to feel helpless in the face of events we can't control and argued that it offers an animal model of depression.They noted striking parallels between the effects of learned helplessness and depressive symptoms: passivity,appetite and weight loss,and difficulty learning that one can change circumstances for the better.But we must be cautious in drawing conclusions from animal studies because many psychological conditions,including depression,may differ in animals and humans (Raulin & Lilienfeld,2008).

Question 4

Identify and describe the four main classes of symptoms of schizophrenia.

Question 5

Discuss the biological explanations for schizophrenia,including brain,biochemical,and genetic differences.

Question 6

Contrast the demonic and moral treatment approaches of mental illness.

Question 7

Identify and discuss important considerations in distinguishing between normal and psychologically disordered behaviour.

Question 8

Differentiate between the psychological disorders of dissociative identity disorder (DID)and schizophrenia.

Question 9

Identify and discuss two important myths as well as the reality of suicide and important risk factors that predict suicide attempts.

Question 10

What are phobias? Describe agoraphobia,specific phobias,and social anxiety disorder.