Psychology : Semester I : Stress and Mental Illness

Sections:

Introduction  |   Section 1  |  Section 2  |   Section 3 | Section 4

Psychology : Stress and Mental Illness : Section 2 History of Abnormal Behavior As an area of interest, psychology has been around for a long time and people have been trying to find out and explain the differences between normal and abnormal behavior. The attempts to look at and understand abnormal behavior goes back to the Greeks and spans the time to today. Ideas, beliefs and attitudes towards abnormal behavior have gone from believing that people were possessed to believing that people can become mentally ill and are in need of treatment.  Let’s look at the history of abnormal behavior to see how far we have come. Click on the slide shown below to begin the presentation. Be sure your volume is turned up to a reasonable level. As you watched the tutorial, did you think that some of the practices were cruel and somewhat barbaric?  From the vantage point of today they may have appeared to be forms of torture but we need to keep in mind that the diagnostic tools of today were not available to people then, and they did the best they could with what they had. Also, the lines between normal and abnormal behavior are not definite. It is difficult, possibly impossible, to define a specific set of behaviors that everyone will agree to constitute abnormality that would define mental illness.  There have been four attempts to distinguish behavior as normal or abnormal.  The first attempt was to define abnormal as a departure from a statistically calculated norm or what the majority of people do and do not do.  The problem with this definition is that there are many people that do not follow the “norm” but that does not mean that they are abnormal.  Many artistic people are not typical of the majority of people but that does not mean that they are abnormal.  A second attempt was to look at personal emotional discomfort that was caused by the behavior.  Depression and anxiety cause great emotional distress but not all abnormal behaviors have emotional distress for the person. An example is mania where the manic person is euphoric and filled with energy and grandiose ideas.  The third attempt was to look at departures from socially unacceptable behaviors.  What might be considered abnormal for one culture may be normal for another. An example of this is that many Native Americans believe in the importance of dreams and use dream catchers which may be considered abnormal in other cultures. The last attempt was to look at the degree of maladaptive behavior and how harmful it is to the person or others. The problem with this is that many people who show maladaptive behavior are not mentally ill, as in some criminals. The practical approach today sees abnormality as including those patterns of thought, behavior and emotional reaction that significantly impair a person’s functioning within their culture. This approach takes in all of the definitions above.  Try this crossword puzzle on the history of abnormal behavior. Go on to the next section.

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