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Schizophrenia Case Studies Essay

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1. Neurotransmission can have a great impact on human behavior and this is shown in Caspi et al. done in 2003. He took 1037 26 year old New Zealander participants and he aimed to see the role of 5 HTT in depression after stressful events. He tested the participants to see if they carried the gene 5 HTT or the mutation with short alleles and depression was tested via self-report. They found that the mutation correlated with the onset of depression after a stressful event. This may indicate that genes play a role in behavior like depression. So the 5 HTT gene is correlated with the onset of depression. Neurotransmitters can play a role in the onset of mental illnesses along with environmental factors. They used self-report so the participants …show more content…

The validity of diagnosis was tested by Rosenhan in 1973, he aimed to challenge the validity of mental health diagnoses. Validity refers to giving the correct diagnosis and this is difficult because there may not be objective signs of a disorder or the symptoms may overlap with many other disorders. He did this by taking 5 male and 3 female participants and made them set up and appointment with the hospital and claim that they were hearing voices that said thing like thud. After they were admitted they stopped showing the symptoms and documented their time there by writing. All the participants were diagnosed with schizophrenia except one and the staff did not suspect anything but the other patients did. The staff saw everything they did as crazy even if it was normal behavior. Rosenhan’s study was not ethical because the participants could not drop out any time and lived in the poor conditions of the facility but they were kept confidential. Deception was used on the mental hospital and it resulted in people being turned away after the experiment. It was high in ecological validity because it was done at a hospital and it was a field experiment. The study had a low sample size and less females were used. It was only done on the western culture and a few mental hospitals so may have low ecological

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