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

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

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

• 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.

What is different about abnormality?
• Prevalence
• Incidence
• Course
– Chronic, episodic, time-limited
– Prognosis
• Onset
– Acute, insidious

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

• Causation: etiology
– Some quite clear, others unknown or not understood
– Biopsychosocial model: we’ll 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

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