Designing Your Character & Other Handy Things 2

Psychological Disorders

Just a heads up, all of this is coming from official sources such as recent psychological textbooks and websites connected to the DSM-5, which is the most recent book describing every psychological disorder as of February of 2019. These are all generalization, and symptoms of each disorder will vary from person to person.

First off, I'm gonna lay out some definitions for psychological disorders.

There are 4 "D" used to determine whether something is considered a mental disorder, and it must have all 4 in order to consider it to be one:-Disturbance of thought, emotion, or behavior-Dysfunction of biological or developmental processes that interferes with everyday functioning.-Distress or Disability in everyday life that leads to discomfort, pain, or anguish either in the person directly or in others.-Deviant thought, emotion, or behavior. (But only if it is also dysfunctional)

Now, onto the different categories and their types, some of which have their own category.

Neurodevelopmental Disorders:

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)-

-ADHD must have displayed the symptoms before the age of 12 in order for a person to actually be diagnosed with it.- It is characterized by less pronounced brain activity- Some of the symptoms include inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity- The causes are believed to be a mixture of genetic and environmental factorsSimilar to this is Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), which holds the same symptoms as ADHD, aside from hyperactivity. They are mainly clustered together as the same disorder because they are both treated with the same medications.

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)-

- ASD is characterized by severe language and social impairment with repetitive habits and inward-focused behavior.- They tend to be more interested in inanimate objects than in people and social situations/interactions.- They have difficulty in joint attention, or the ability to make eye contact with others and to look in the same direction as someone else while they are talking or paying attention to them.- Symptoms include: Impaired social interactions, impaired communication skills, and repetitive/stereotypical behaviors.- Those on the high end of the spectrum may be quite advanced and highly intelligent. This was previously known as Asperger's Syndrome, and while the term is still used, it has since been removed from use as official diagnosis.- Some of the causes are believed to be abnormal mirror neurons (neurons that activate in the brain when you watch a person perform a task the same way as if it was you performing the task), genetics, low amounts of Vitamin D while they are developing in the womb, and a fast growing head and brain in the womb that does not continue to increase in size up to birth, resulting them in being born with a smaller brain. However, the exact causes are unknown.

Schizophrenia:

- Schizophrenia involves the profound disturbances in thought and emotion, particularly impairments in perception, such as hallucinations.- There are three major categories when is comes to symptoms of schizophrenia:   - Positive Symptoms- These symptoms are the presence delusions (false beliefs), hallucinations (false sensations) most of which tend to be auditory and not visual as it is portrayed in most media, and grossly disorganized thoughts and behavior.   - Negative symptoms- These symptoms are the absence of something, specifically lack of speech, flat emotions, inability to complete tasks, and immobility.   -Cognitive symptoms- These symptoms are problems with working memory and attention, verbal and visual learning, reasoning and problem solving, and disordered speech, more specifically something known as word salad which is speech that will follow grammatical rules, but make little sense, and using made up words.- The causes of schizophrenia are mainly explained through the Diathesis- Stress Model, which says that a combination of genetic vulnerability (heritability being 70-85%) and environmental risks, such as stress related problems while in the womb and an abusive environment growing up are some of the main causes/ contributes  of schizophrenia. Other causes are believed to be a dysfunctional prefrontal cortex and its working memory as well as a small hippocampus and abnormal brain development before birth.- It is also believed that people with schizophrenia have an excess of dopamine activity in certain areas of the brain