Julie Giyer
PSY/410
9-17, 12
Jamie Frank
Psychotic, childhood, and cognitive disorders
Many disorders are said to form in the stages of childhood or are in some way are bound to an individual by genetics. Some may just gradually appear or grow more intense over a period of time. No matter the disorder, it can make a person’s life a challenging one. The disorders that will be discussed below are psychotic disorders, childhood disorders, and cognitive disorders and how they affect an individual’s life.
Psychotic disorders
Psychosis is a symptom that causes an individual to be out of touch with reality. An individual may experience hallucinations and delusions. Schizophrenia is a disorder that fits into this category. The characteristics of schizophrenia are hallucinations, delusions, disorganized thought or speech, bizarre behavior, decrease in speech, emotional flattening, lack of motivation, and lack of pleasure. It has five subtypes known as paranoid schizophrenia, disorganized schizophrenia, catatonic schizophrenia, residual schizophrenia, and undifferentiated schizophrenia.
The biological components look at the distal and proximal causes. According to Hansell & Damour (2008), The proximal causes of the symptoms involve various abnormalities in brain function, brain structure, and neuropsychological/neurophysiological status that may cause schizophrenic symptoms (though it is also possible that some of them are effects, not causes, of schizophrenia). The distal causes are what help to answer the questions to what the causes of schizophrenia may be. The cognitive components focus on the deficits in reasoning and the role that attention has. Interventions address those deficits to help treat schizophrenia.
The sociocultural perspective focuses on institutional and large social forces that may have been the cause of the disorder. The family systems perspective suggests that the family has much do with
References: Hansell, J. & Damour, L. (2008). Abnormal psychology (2nd ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.