PSYA02H3 Study Guide - Obsessive–Compulsive Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Panic Disorder
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PSYA02H3 Full Course Notes
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Document Summary
To qualify as a mental disorder, thoughts, feelings, and emotions must be persistent, harmful to the person experiencing them and uncontrollable. The complicated human mind can produce behaviors, thoughts, and emotions that change radically from moment to moment. In ancient times people who acted strangely or reported bizarre thoughts or emotions were often understood in the context of religions or the supernatural. In some cultures and religious traditions, madness is still interpreted as possession by animal spirits or demons or as god"s punishment. These ways of looking at psychological abnormalities have been replaced in industrialized areas of the world by a medical model. => the conceptualization of psychological disorders as diseases that, like physical diseases, have biological causes, defined symptoms, and possible cures. Treating abnormal behavior in the way we treat illness suggests that the first step is to determine the nature of the problem through diagnosis.
