PSYC 337 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Bipolar Disorder, Natural Selection, Insomnia
7 May 2018
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Lecture 1: Introduction
●What is psychopathology?
○How to define “mental illness”?
■Wakefield defined it as “harmful dysfunction”
●Dysfunction, meaning an organ system performing contrary to its design
(and importantly, not at the peak of its design)
○That’s why we can’t just say “deviant”, because deviant could be
a good thing (i.e. Venus Williams is statistically deviant in terms
of her physical ability)
●He would argue that the brain is designed to perform a number of
functions
○Thinking
○Feeling
○Emotion regulation
●Problems with any of these functions indicates a disorder
○Presumes however that we understand everything about how the
brain, body, etc. are supposed to function
■Lilienfeld’s critique of Wakefield
●What is “natural function”? - i.e., we don’t know enough about the brain,
body, etc.
●Natural selection depends on variability - some variability is necessary
and will always be present in a population (i.e. how many people must
have this “disorder” for it to be contrary to the “norm”)
●Some disorders may represent adaptations, not maladaptations (e.g.
depression may be an adaptive response to a hopeless situation - clinical
depression is just an extreme of the adaptive response)
○It’s also hard to pin down the idea of “harmful” - to whom? (e.g.
a psychopath may not feel distress about their situation, but may
harm others)
■Widiger’s proposal
●Mental disorders are constructs
●You can measure multiple indicators of that construct, but you can’t
measure it directly - so the disorder can be measured in bits and pieces
(i.e. indicators of a construct, whereby the combination of these
indicators can inform a decision about the construct)
■Basically, there is no agreement on what a mental disorder is
○Medical models
■Syndromes → a mental illness as a syndrome would feature symptoms that could
point to a diagnosable disorder
●Emil Kraepelin
■Medical models acknowledge illness as multifactorial, but this is not always
applied to mental illness/disorders
●Etiological models of psychopathology
○Etiology → scientific study of the cause of something (attempts to understand why
people become ill)
○Early etiology
■Attributed mental illness to environment/learning
●Freudian theories → early stressors
●Schizophrenogenic mother → an idea where a mother who is
overprotective and projecting causes schizophrenia
●Refrigerator mother → 1960’s, idea that mothers who lacked genuine
warmth caused autism in children
○Newer etiology
■Considers also the role of genetics and biology
■Genetics
●Mental illness is heritable (though not perfectly so, there are
environmental contributions)
○Genes are not deterministic - no single genes have been found to
strongly predict mental illness
○Most genes are probabilistic (e.g. people from a family are more
likely to be 6’ tall, but there can be exceptions)
○Most genes also make small contributions (with other genes) to
create the ultimate outcome
Document Summary
Dysfunction, meaning an organ system performing contrary to its design (and importantly, not at the peak of its design) That"s why we can"t just say deviant , because deviant could be a good thing (i. e. venus williams is statistically deviant in terms of her physical ability) He would argue that the brain is designed to perform a number of functions. Problems with any of these functions indicates a disorder. Presumes however that we understand everything about how the brain, body, etc. are supposed to function. I. e. , we don"t know enough about the brain, body, etc. Natural selection depends on variability - some variability is necessary and will always be present in a population (i. e. how many people must have this disorder for it to be contrary to the norm ) Some disorders may represent adaptations, not maladaptations (e. g. depression may be an adaptive response to a hopeless situation - clinical depression is just an extreme of the adaptive response)
