Psychological Disorders

Chapters 15 & 16 – Psychological Disorders

This is the bookSchacter, D.L., D.T. Gilbert, M.K., Nock, and D.M.,Wegner (2017).  Psychology (4^th ed.).  New York: MacMillan.

Read through chapters 15 and 16 in your textbook. Select and describe a particular disorder that interests you (bipolar disorders, autism, agoraphobia, borderline personality disorder, etc.) as well as a concomitant form of treatment (behavioral and cognitive therapies, psychotherapy) designed to help manage the disorder of your choice. Once you’ve chosen your disorder, apply it to a character from a book, TV show, movie, or an individual that you may know in real life (keep them anonymous and use pseudonyms or alternative names) that seems to have this condition. What makes you believe that that particular individual might have this disorder based on the symptomatic behavioral manifestations they are exhibiting? What form of treatment or therapy would be best for them?

Formatting instructions

• Turn in your paper through the Canvas website for your intro Psychology course
• Submit only Word documents or PDF files! Other formats will not be able to be opened
• papers will be checked for plagiarism
• Text must be double spaced
• Typed in 12 point “Times New Roman” font
• APA format of your textbook in the text of the paper
• APA format reference section of book

Additional Information and Hints For Your Paper

• Be creative with your example; don’t just adapt one presented in the book.
• You receive credit in the grading rubric for following simple formatting instructions, and for writing clearly and correctly. These are all good professional skills!
• For your personal experience, do more than tell your story: Show explicitly how you are applying the information to your own experience.
• Look over the grading rubric to see how your paper will be evaluated before you write.
• Use correct APA format to reference your textbook when citing information or concepts from the textbook. Since this writing assignment is not a full research report, it does not require all aspects of an APA formatted paper,such as a title page, abstract, table of contents, introduction, materials and methods, results or discussion sections.
• What it will require is correct font, font size, spacing of text, correct margins, in text citation of your textbook and an APA formatted reference section including the text.

Example Paper:

In the field of psychology, disorders that impair any aspect of an individual’s functionality are of great interest and concern. Psychologists and other health care professionals strive to research, understand and diagnose these debilitating conditions that alter an individual’s way of life. Of the many diagnosable disorders, Schizophrenia is a particularly devastating mental disorder that impairs one’s ability to function normally and causes them to lose touch with reality (Schacter, Gilbert, Nock, & Wegner, 2017).

Like all mental disorders, schizophrenia has its own underlying neuroanatomical basis that conduces to its characteristic symptoms. Specifically, the lateral ventricles in schizophrenics are enlarged (Schacter et al., 2017), which conduces to a loss of cortical tissue. Subsequently this may result in hypofrontality, wherein schizophrenics have decreased activities in their frontal lobes and with carrying out executive functions. In addition, this reduction in cortical matter may give rise to a variety of positive and negative symptoms (Schacter et al., 2017).

Positive symptoms are an additional element to a schizophrenic’s experience of reality and are usually averse. The most prominent of these positive symptoms are auditory hallucinations, wherein an individual can hear threatening, insidious voices that haunt them (Schacter et al., 2017). Other positive symptoms include fanciful delusions of people plotting against them, or delusions of grandeur in which schizophrenics believe that they are superior to others. Negative symptoms, on the other hand, consist of an absence in experience. With this there is a flattened emotional affect or absence of emotional experiences, and even social withdrawal (Schacter et al., 2017).

In the movie, A Beautiful Mind, character, John Nash, demonstrates a range of symptoms characteristic to a schizophrenia diagnosis. For example, Nash frequently experiences both auditory and visual hallucinations and delusions that manifest themselves in his old roommate and governmental programs. Nash believes that he has been invited to a secret United States Department of Defense facility in the Pentagon and experiences unlikely and grandiose paranoia’s surrounding their intent with his mathematical abilities. These symptoms alter Nash’s daily life and functioning so much that he nearly causes the death of his own son.

Evidence-based practice suggests that the best treatment for those with schizophrenia is a combination of antipsychotic medications and psychosocial therapy (Schacter et al., 2017). Drugs, such as Clozapine, work on the dopamine receptors in the brain by antagonizing them or preventing dopamine receptors from being activated when dopamine binds to it (Schacter et al., 2017). This suggests that in schizophrenia there is increased dopaminergic activity that may lead to these positive symptoms of delusions and hallucinations. Taking Clozapine, however, helps to abate the occurrence of these positive symptoms as dopamine activity is reduced.

In conclusion, schizophrenia is a debilitating disorder that alters the functionality of the individual through both positive and negative symptoms such as auditory and visual hallucinations, delusions and catatonia. John Nash demonstrates a variety of these symptoms in A Beautiful Mind. In the movie, he is given antipsychotic medication and is able to return to a functional lifestyle of teaching.