Abnormal Behavior
From the everyday oddities seen on the street corner to the well-documented blow-ups of celebrities like Mel Gibson and Charlie Sheen, abnormal behavior is alive and well.
Hollywood glamorizes lost, tortured souls like Marilyn Monroe and Kurt Cobain. Tabloids and blogs are full of stories of artists, their neuroses, and often untimely deaths. The movie industry provides a plethora of pseudo-documentation of the odd. To name a few:
Psycho, The Silence of the Lambs: Antisocial personality disorder, violent psychosis
Rain Man: Autism
The Aviator: Obsessive-compulsive disorder
Fight Club, Sybil: Dissociative identity disorder
A Beautiful Mind, Black Swan: Schizophrenia
The Notebook: Alzheimer's disease
50 First Dates: Anterograde amnesia, memory loss
The Bourne Identity, Finding Nemo: Retrograde amnesia, memory loss
Girl, Interrupted: Borderline, personality disorder
Prozac Nation, The Hours: Depression
The study of conditions like these comprises the discipline of abnormal psychology. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) defines psychological disorders.
Historic and contemporary psychologists have identified disorders and who suffers from them, categorized the diagnosis, identified criteria for diagnosis, and modeled potential treatments. Familiarize yourself with common reactions to labeling of disorders and the way these conditions affect crime and punishment.
Study Break
"I just want to be perfect." – Nina, Black Swan
What is Abnormal?
Psychopathology is the field of psychology and medicine that steps in when things get a little…crazy. Politically incorrect puns aside, psychopathology defines, treats, and studies psychological disorders, a symptom or group of symptoms that make it difficult for an individual to function in different areas of life and/or causes significant distress.
We all feel a little strange, off, out of sync, isolated from the group. But clinically, something else is up. The Four Ds are often used to help determine the presence of psychopathology. Just because criteria like this exist doesn't mean they're the end-all-be-all deciding factors of psychopathology.
Distress: The person is in a less-than-desired state of existence. Maybe they can't stop crying. Perhaps they're afraid to touch door handles. In any case, the issues cause them upset and suffering.
Danger: The person may harm themselves or others, or perhaps someone is harming them. This can be seen through reckless behavior in all areas of life (like binge drinking, ignoring personal safety, playing hooky from work every day).
Dysfunction: The way the person lives their life, usually due to some sort of psychological issue, is maladaptive. It can be things like avoiding social interaction or having issues with self-care (like showering, waking in the morning). Usually dysfunction is more related to a person's immediate environment, and not to things going on inside their head.
Deviance: This is the problem. "Deviance" means straying from what a society says is normal. But really, what's normal? Are you normal? If someone's maybe two sandwiches short of a mental picnic, does it automatically mean that they have a psychological condition? Not necessarily. We've all known that librarian/barista/car salesman with the funky glasses and wacky pet chinchilla. Just because they're not a cookie-cutter version of what we see on TV doesn't mean they're diagnosable.
