Abnormal Behavior: a historical perspective

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Abnormal Behavior a historical perspective

• Being part of history

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What is abnormal?

• Psychological disorders
• Dysfunction
• Distress
• Unexpected or atypical cultural response
• cognition, emotion, behavior

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Psychopathology

• How one describes problems
• The medical model
• Mental problems as mental illness disease
• Interactional views or systems thinking

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Describing what you see, or what you think you see

• Clinical descriptions lead to diagnostic labels
• Labels can be helpful and/or harmful
• Presenting problem many different approaches
• The complaint what the person describes or
  someone else describes as the reason for seeking
  treatment
• Clear descriptions lead to clearer treatment

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Now its your turn

• Tom is uncomfortable riding elevators. Your
  office is on the fifteenth floor and Tom walked
  all the way up and not for the exercise
• Rachel has been caught urinating in the corner of
  her bedroom.

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What is different about abnormality?

• Prevalence
• Incidence
• Course
• Chronic, episodic, time-limited
• Prognosis
• Onset
• Acute, insidious

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Lots of other possible factors

• Culture
• Ethnicity
• Race
• Gender
• Age
• Developmental stage

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Some considerations

• Causation etiology
• Some quite clear, others unknown or not
  understood
• Biopsychosocial model well return to this
• What to do or what not to do about it treatment
• Will it go away on its own or get worse?
• Empirically validated treatments
• Confounding variables did the treatment work or
  was it something else?
• The Placebo Effect

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Historical Traditions

• Supernatural
• Biological
• Psychological
• Psychoanalytic
• Humanistic
• Behavioral