Race and IQ Lecture 19 Notes If we are biologically different then the races are different subsets of humans However there are no racial differences in IQ because there are no racial differences in anything because race doesn t exist Mental Illness Outline What is abnormal o Examples o Criteria Deviance Maladaptive behavior Personal Distress Misconceptions o Personal Weakness o Incurable o Violent Behavior o Bizarre Behavior DSM IV Our understanding of mental illness lags far behind our understanding of physical illness How do you know someone is mentally ill culture Examples They engage in behavior that is not normal abnormal What is abnormal depends on the Hearing voices schizophrenia in our culture while in the Lakota Su culture it means that the person is communication with the gods Some behavior is deviant or abnormal depending on the extent to which it is done Some behavior is deviant or abnormal depending on who is doing it example o If a man dresses up in women s clothes that is considered abnormal o If a woman dresses up in man s clothes that is seen as not only okay but stylish Criteria If you define deviant abnormal by societal standards where do you draw the line a Deviance behavior that is inconsistent with social norms can be difficult to determine this and the norms change over time b Maladaptive Behavior impairs a persons ability to function adequately in normal social situations such band hygiene cannot hold job c Personal Distress behavior which gives the individual a great deal of distress Content maladaptive behavior behavior that appears bizarre or irration behavior that is unpredictable person may do things that seem unmotivated by the environment that they are in or uncontrollable you cannot stop person from doing something strange Context where and when the behavior takes place Misconceptions Diagnosis Rosenhan Consequences suffering or distress caused to individual and others Mental disorders indicate personal weakness or responsibility people are just as responsible for mental illness as for physical illness Mental illness is incurable most mentally ill people improve over all levels of illness Mentally ill people are violent most mentally ill people are NOT violent Mentally ill people have bizarre behavior only a small percentage of mentally ill people exhibit bizarre behavior and usually only with very severe disorders Diagnosis has improved over the last 30 50 year A lot of diagnosis issues stem from the psychological community and the way people are accredited to diagnose and treat mental illness Many people diagnosing mental illness have not been well trained to do so Case that showed that problems needed to be solved o An immigrant came from the USA from china who was diagnosed with tuberculosis and he was put into an institution to cure his tuberculosis Why he was treated with TB be was diagnosed as mentally ill Basis for diagnosis he was talking a language no one could understand they brought in Chinese interpreters and none of the interpreters could understand so people thought he was speaking his own private language He was kept in the mental institution for 30 years and did not learn English during that time Then one day he was talking and someone answered him The man was speaking a very local and dissimilar dialect in China The guy was not mentally ill he was speaking his native language but it was very rare He had been institutionalized for so long that he could no longer take care of himself 1973 Rosenhan was interested in how initial diagnosis affects treatment Does the initial diagnosis label stick Had grad students say that they hear a voice saying dull empty thud After that they should answer truthfully all other questions Rosenhan wanted to know what happens after the students are diagnosed as schizophrenic Expectations Question 1 students diagnosed as schizophrenic 2 students would be admitted to the hospital o If admitted to the hospital and the grad students never displayed the symptom again and answered all questions truthfully will diagnosis change All of the people that Rosenhan sent to the mental hospital were admitted All except one were diagnosed as schizophrenic Students stayed in the hospital for stays ranging from 7 days to 52 days 2 months The average stay was 19 days No psychologically trained individual uncovered discovered that none of these people were sick In no case did they discover that the initial diagnosis was wrong and that there was nothing wrong with these people DSM In almost ever case the other patients in the hospital uncovered the fraud The people who had pretended to hear voices were taking extensive notes on what was happening to them over the course of the day The patients in the hospital came to them and said you aren t really sick are you The psychologists interpreted the note taking as a symptom of schizophrenia Psychologists were outraged they claimed that The Rosenhan study was unfair because they were never notified ahead of time that there would be people coming pretending to be mentally ill it was unreasonable to expect that they could tell the people who were really mentally ill from the people who were not Rosenhan then said he would do it again he said sometime in the next 30 days we will send someone to your institution see if you get them Hospitals caught a number of people how many of these people were Rosenhan s confederates and how many confederates got into the hospital anyway The hospitals caught 0 of the people because Rosenhan didn t send any major clinical disorders major clinical syndromes personality and development disorders Physical disorders Severity of psychosocial stressors not very accurate Global Assessment of Functioning rating of functional impairment Diagnostic Statistic Manual contains 200 disorders Information is gathered and judgments are made on five axes Axis I Axis II Axis III Axis IV Axis V Axis I Major clinical disorders are very severe disorders they are gathered into groups and categories require hospitalization or continuous regular drug treatment Axis II Personality and development disorders The personality disorders are milder versions of the major clinical disorders This is an enormous grey area Low reliability in many cases diagnosis depends as much on who is making the diagnosis as on what might be wrong with you These are very clear cut disorders Some are reliable some are not reliable anxiety disorders
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