PSYA02H3 Chapter 14: PSYA02 - Chapter 14.docx
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PSYA02H3 Full Course Notes
Verified Note
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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. Treating abnormal behavior in the way we treat illness suggests that the first step is to determine the nature of the problem through diagnosis. In diagnosis, clinicians seek to determine the nature of the patient"s mental disease by assessing symptoms -> behaviors, thoughts and emotions suggestive of an underlying abnormal syndrome, a coherent cluster of symptoms due to a single cause. Every action or thought suggestive of abnormality cannot be traced to an underlying disease.
