Defining & Diagnosing Psychological Disorders
- Explain the criteria used to define a psychological disorder
- Describe the biopsychosocial model and the role of the DSM
- Distinguish major anxiety, mood, and psychotic disorders by their symptoms
What counts as a disorder?
Psychologists define a psychological disorder as a pattern of thoughts, feelings, or behaviors that is dysfunctional (maladaptive), causes distress, and is often deviant from cultural norms — the "three Ds," with dysfunction and distress carrying the most weight. Deviance alone is not enough; context and culture matter. The dominant framework is the biopsychosocial model, which sees disorders as arising from the interaction of biological (genes, brain chemistry), psychological (thoughts, stress), and social-cultural factors, replacing older single-cause explanations.
The DSM and the risk of labels
Clinicians classify disorders using the DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual), which provides standardized diagnostic criteria so professionals can communicate and research reliably. Diagnosis has benefits — guiding treatment and research — but also risks. David Rosenhan’s study, in which healthy pseudopatients were admitted to psychiatric hospitals and everything they did was then interpreted through the diagnostic label, showed how a label can bias perception and become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Labels can also stigmatize, so they must be used carefully.
Major categories of disorders
Anxiety disorders feature distressing, persistent anxiety: generalized anxiety (free-floating worry), panic disorder (sudden terror attacks), phobias (intense irrational fear of a specific object), and related OCD (obsessions and compulsions) and PTSD. Depressive and bipolar disorders involve mood: major depressive disorder (prolonged hopelessness and loss of interest) and bipolar disorder (alternating depression and mania). Schizophrenia, a psychotic disorder, involves a split from reality — positive symptoms (hallucinations, delusions, disorganized speech) and negative symptoms (flat affect, withdrawal).
A college student experiences sudden, unexpected episodes of pounding heart, shortness of breath, dizziness, and an overwhelming sense of terror that peak within minutes and pass, though he now dreads when the next one will strike. Identify the most likely disorder and justify it using diagnostic reasoning.
- 1.Note the key symptoms: sudden, intense episodes of physical arousal (racing heart, breathlessness, dizziness) with terror that peaks quickly.
- 2.Rule out generalized anxiety: GAD is chronic, diffuse worry, not brief, sudden attacks — so it does not fit the episodic pattern.
- 3.Match the pattern: recurrent, unexpected attacks of intense fear peaking within minutes are the hallmark of panic disorder.
- 4.Confirm with the added feature: dread about future attacks (anticipatory anxiety) is a defining part of panic disorder.
A person hears voices no one else hears, holds firm false beliefs that strangers are plotting against her, and speaks in disorganized, jumbled sentences. These are best classified as:
In schizophrenia, "positive" and "negative" do not mean good or bad. Positive symptoms are additions to normal experience (hallucinations, delusions); negative symptoms are subtractions (flat affect, mutism, withdrawal). Think "positive = present, negative = absent."
A clinician argues that a client’s depression stems from a genetic vulnerability, a habit of pessimistic thinking, and recent job loss and isolation together. This explanation best reflects:
When a scenario lists causes from multiple domains (genes + thoughts + environment), the answer is the biopsychosocial model. For disorder identification, anchor each category to one signature: anxiety = persistent fear/worry, mood = emotional extremes, schizophrenia = break from reality.
Answer the 2 checkpoints as you read.
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