Question

Question 1.

Of the approaches to personality described in your textbook - psychodynamic/psychoanalytic, behaviourist, humanist, and trait theorist - which do you find the most compelling? Why? Include a description of the theory you chose.

Chapter 15: Psychological Disorders

Question 2.

Discuss the pros/cons (i.e., advantages/disadvantages) of using the DSM-5 to diagnose mental disorders. Choose a diagnosis that you think is controversial and make a case for why you think it is controversial. (e.g., gender bias, lack of evidence, culture bias, pathologizing normal behaviour, etc.)

Chapter 16: Psychological Treatments

Question 3.

Compare and contrast the use of medical and psychological therapies to treat mental disorders. Your answer should include a description of each as well as examples. I suggest choosing a specific class of disorders to make your answer more specific (e.g., anxiety disorders).

Answer 1

Answer for Question 1:

The psychoanalysis founder Sigmund Freud gave the most compelling psychodynamic approach to psychology. It highlighted the control of the unconscious mind on our behavior in everyday day. He believed that our mind has three major elements to perform a task, namely id, ego, and the superego. He gave more importance to the unconscious mind and how we try to match it with our childhood experiences to shape our adult personality.

I find this is most compelling because it covers all the factors of a human being to shape him properly. He even added that human behavior is full of thoughts and feelings that are nothing but come from the sub conscious mind, every behavior is a result of a cause/reason. We follow and restrict ourselves and respect elders in the public places; this is due to the taught behavior from our childhood of how to behave in front of elders.

In the psychodynamic theory, anxiety is nothing but the conflict between the id and our ego. Aggressive and impulsive behavior in a human being may be an experience when he received some unacceptable result from the expected one. Hence, he gets the anxiety disorder as a result.

Question 2: The DSM-5 stands for the term Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition; it is used as guidelines to physicians. It is like a means of communication to physicians who treat the patients. It contains the symptoms, descriptions and related information when diagnosing mental disorders. With the standardized format of DSM, the billing is easier for the insurance company.

Some of the advantages of DSM are; it standardizes diagnoses and treatment, standardizes billing and coding. Because of this, the patients could receive effective and appropriate treatment despite their location or ability to pay. DSM guides the research of mental health field which follow strict guidelines. It guides the therapy how to proceed with the patient for a particular disorder.

The disadvantages of DSM could be it shows only the most visible symptoms of the patient and leaving less visible symptoms while documenting in the DSM. Many researchers say that it oversimplifies the human behavior by reducing complexed to labels and numbers. Some therapists feel that labeling a patient is not the right way and instead of attaching labels to the patients you can specify the name of the specific disorder to them; however this labeling is much needed by the insurance company reference for billing.

Diagnosis of anxiety disorders: Once the disorder has been cleared, he/she no longer has to perceive the anxiety to be unreasonable or excessive. I think referring the patient for treatment of anxiety disorder is not fair and providing medications for the everyday worries is not fair.

I think this DSM has limiting focus to environmental factors like poverty, sexism, gender bias, etc. Here, white males are primarily and consistently represented the dominant group that are responsible for the development of DSM, and they decided which are the healthy and unhealthy behaviors. There is a specific gender bias like feminine attributes of being emotional, tendency to be cautious are termed as personality disorders; and individualism and autonomy are termed as healthy behaviors and not coded as disorders. Some other examples are clinicians take male patients as healthy when compared to female patients (they see them as mentally ill on looking at them) as unhealthy and prescribe mood altering medication to women more readily than man. I felt this is more controversial.

Question 3:

Anxiety disorders are those mental health disorders that are described with the feelings of worry, fear or anxiety which distracts the person's life. You can see the symptoms of anxiety such as feeling nervous, restless, always afraid of the environment, increased heart rate, sweating, feeling tired and weak. Examples are obsessive compulsive disorder, post traumatic stress disorder, etc. if a person is suffering from anxiety disorder, in the long run, he might get palpitations or chest pain, risk of high blood pressure and heart diseases.

So, it is very much needed to treat it as early as possible. The various treatment options available for anxiety are psychological counseling and therapy such as cognitive behavioral therapy or pharmacotherapy, where the patient is given with medicines like pregabalin, buspirone, and antidepressants. Cognitive behavioral therapy is the best and most effective therapy for anxiety disorders. Research shows that psychotherapy or cognitive behavioral therapy is more effective than medications for an anxiety disorder patient.