Psychopathology Studies

An out-of-body experience is explained by few as a sense of being detached from one’s body, and if associated with other factors like a sense that the world is not real, far away, or even foggy. This with the combination of failure to recall significant personal information, or the content of a meaningful conversation forgotten from one second to the next are signs of a psychological disorder known as Dissociative Disorder. Considered as a rare and mysterious psychiatric curiosity, Dissociative Disorders will be the psychological disorder that will be discussed in this paper.

31 y/o AA male patient seen today for psychiatric-mental health assessment. He is awake, alert and oriented x4. He is calm, cooperative and follows commands during assessment. The patient reports he is depressed, difficulty sleeping and nightmares at night. The patient explained his depression is as a result of deep thinking from a news he received two days ago from his elder brother that his mother is ill. Stressors identified by the patient include losing his job a week ago before the news about his mother; his wife is 6-months pregnant with their first child, who currently works part-time at her present job; patient relates difficulty paying monthly bills and inability to provide adequately for his family as a man. The patient denies mood swings, suicidal/homicidal thoughts and ideation. Patient reports his spouse is at work at the moment and he does not want to put stress on his wife due to her current condition. Patient denies been hospitalized for depression or psychiatric illness; and denies family history of mental illness. Patient reports he is seeking help because he does not like feeling this way using terms of “helpless and loss of worth from his spouse”. Patient reports he needs help with his depression and nightmares before his current condition get out of hands and ruined his marriage.

Psychopathology is the study of mental distress and abnormal maladaptive behaviour, there are four approaches to psychopathology, cognitive, behavioural, psychodynamic and biological. The biological model of abnormality is split into four parts which can all cause abnormal behaviour these are; Genetic, Brain injury, Neurotransmitters and Infection.

Many psychotic patients, especially schizophrenics, display a lack of insight into their disorder (Keefe 9). Lack of insight refers to an unawareness of having a disorder, unawareness of having psychotic symptoms, and a refusal of treatment. Some scientists include other more specific aspects such as patients' views on cause of their disorder and/or symptoms,

The most common research design used to assess risk for violence is the cohort study; a cohort of offenders is assessed and followed up over a period of time to determine who was violent and who was not. Nonetheless, the interpretation of these findings is made difficult by risk factors, the outcome for violence, the follow-up procedure, and the accuracy of statistics. There is great variability when it comes to how risk factors are defined and assessed. They can be examined as empirical markers, consequences, or causes of the outcome but Dr. Hart, along with colleague Kevin Douglas, conducted a meta-analysis and defined the risk factor in terms of symptoms, evaluating them according to different time frames (current versus lifetime) and at

The target population for this study were forty White people from Colorado State University. The use of only white people was because they wanted to reflect the ethnic diversity of Colorado State University. In the year 2013-2014, Colorado State University undergraduates had 22,565 students and 74.36% considered them as white and 2.09% considered them as Black. In the second experiment, fifty-nine participants from Colorado State University participated in this experiment that had course credit in Introductory Psychology. This was a non-probability sample because this does not give all the individuals in the population equal chances of being selected. They only used one college and this college was not as diverse.

Abnormal and clinical psychology are two branches in the field of psychological studies. In simple words, abnormal psychology can be defined as the study of people who engage in unusual behavior and emotional thoughts. These actions and thoughts are considered abnormal compared to those of other members of society, and they significantly interfere with their functioning in life. Clinical psychology goes hand in hand with abnormal psychology because it is the study that deals with the assessment and treatment of those abnormal actions. Learning about these branches of psychology can help us understand and predict behaviors of people who that are affected by these disorders. It is also essential to advance our knowledge to help assess the people who suffer these illnesses to lead a life of better quality. In this paper, a case study that entails a brief vignette of a 35 year old paralegal named Greg will be analyzed. According to concepts of abnormal and clinical psychology, Greg will be diagnosed with the psychological disorder of obsessive-compulsive disorder (more formally known as OCD) that might have originated in the anal stage of the psychoanalytic theory, for which cognitive behavioral therapy will be used as a possible treatment.

The independent variables were the criminogenic factors; these factors were summed up into 60 items- questions used in questionnaires; such as “before the age of 15, did you set fires”- that where AOT (assisted output treatment, programs that housed serious mentally ill patients), measured. The goal of these questionnaires was to create a scale that would allow prediction of past arrest rates, if conclusive the researches would be able to use the scale to predict future arrest rates. The 60 items included were drawn from the Composite International Diagnostic Interview (CIDI), the Reactive-Proactive Aggression Questionnaire (RPAQ), & the Navaco Anger Scale (NAS). An exploratory factor analyses was used on 30 items, centered on arrest history and DSM-diagnosed substance use disorder and criminogenic screening instruments (LS/CMI). With these test the researches were able to identify a three-factor model, where the first factor was the history of antisocial behavior and antisocial personality that was constant with CIDI. The second dimension, current anger and aggression, corresponded to RPAQ and NAS items. The third factor, past violence, corresponded to CIDI. What these test reveled, was data that was interpreted numeracy into ratios between each item and arrest history. A psychotic symptom scale was created from 12 measures of delusion and hallucinations gathered from the

When it comes to personality disorders, some have certain causes to get them; or you are born with them, They can be treated depending on the personality disorder otherwise they can’t, there is one personality disorder that has many similarities with schizophrenia and then there is another personality disorder that has similarities were they are kinda like introverts but not really.

It has since been subjected to further testing with sex offenders and other groups in the Netherlands (de Vries Robbé, de Vogel, Douglas, & Nijman, 2015) and more widely in Canada, Singapore, Ireland and Germany (Abidin et al., 2013; Davoren et al., 2013; Doyle et al., 2014; Turner et al., 2014; Viljoen, 2014; Yoon, Spehr, & Briken, 2011; Zeng, Chu, & Lee, 2015). For example, Viljoen’s prospective study including 102 civil psychiatric patients residing at a large tertiary psychiatric hospital in Canada who were being transferred to community-based tertiary inpatient settings, found a number of interesting gender differences in the predictive validity of SAPROF, START and HCR-20. Generally, these measures performed better with the males when predicting physical and verbal aggression, and better with the females when predicting sexual aggression. Doyle et al.’s (2014), in their prospective study comparing a cohort of forensic patients in 32 medium secure units across England and Wales discharged to prison or the community, found significant differences between the two groups. Those discharged to prison scored higher on the HCR-20 v3 on measures of risk and lower on protective factors measured by SAPROF than those discharged in

Despite the low base rate of psychopathy, as measured by scores on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version (Hart, Cox, & Hare, 1995) among the civil psychiatric patients studied, limited traits of psychopathy and antisocial behavior were predictive of future violence. The PCL-SV added incremental validity to a host of covariates in predicting violence, including recent violence, criminal history, substance abuse, and other personality disorders. However, most of the PCL-SV’s basic and unique predictive power is based on its “antisocial behavior” factor, rather than the “emotional detachment”

The death of greyhound passenger Tim Mclean was caused by the untreated mental illnesses (antisocial personality disorder and Schizophrenia) of Vince Li. The actions of Vince Li can be described by using a branch of psychology called psychopathology. Psychopathology is the study of mental illnesses in individuals. It uses scientific reasoning to help understand how a person’s thoughts and emotions incorporate with their behaviour patterns. In the case of Vince Li, he had two mental illnesses called antisocial personality disorder and Schizophrenia that made him make a tragic choice in August 2008. Antisocial personality disorder addresses

Jeffrey was arrested in the same year, 1988, for sexually fondling and drugging a young teenage boy (age thirteen); for this, he was put on probation for five years and for one year he was assigned to a work release camp where he was registered as a sex offender from the incident with the thirteen year old boy. Due to good behavior and a built up trust with the authorities, Dahmer was paroled from his work release camp two months early.

The insight of patients with schizophrenia and its relationships with other clinical variables has been given much attention in the clinical setting over the last few decades. Since then, some instruments assessing insight have been created in an attempt of better diagnostic mental disorders. The founder of Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT), Aaron T. Beck is an American psychiatrist who is a professor emeritus in the department of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. He applied cognitive models of psychosis in explaining patients’ own evaluation of erroneous or unusual experiences. This perspective was termed cognitive insight and is assessed with the Beck Cognitive Insight Scale (BCIS). The BCIS or Beck Cognitive Insight scale is “a self-administered instrument, with 15 item and is a self-report instrument with two subscales, 9 self-reflectiveness items and 6 self-certainty items. It is designed to evaluate cognitive processes that involves reevaluating patients ' anomalous experiences and specific misinterpretations and to complement scales that describe the lack of awareness of mental illness and its characteristics” (Martin et al., 2010). The format of the scale is the Linkert format which the individual taken the test indicate the degree of the agreement with a question being asked. In this case there is no wrong answer. Some application would have up to six options to avoid allowing the responder to be neutral. The BCIS has four options, do not agree, agree

Mrs. Stephanie Moore will have no difficulty interacting with staff and the areas of verbally presented and written materials. Overall she is showing no strong indicators of clinical psychopathology. Also moderate minimization is apparent and maybe a product of denial and her maladaptive eating patterns. This was discussed with her and pointed out to her. She has had a relatively normal childhood, adolescence years, married years and work life. From testing and interview, it is believed to Mrs. Moore would be a good candidate for bariatric surgery at this time.