Students survey contemporary ideas about abnormal psychology. Topics cover the classification, assessment, and treatment of mental health conditions such as anxiety, mood, dissociative, stress-related, personality, somatic, and psychotic disorders. Legal and ethical issues will be examined.
Prerequisites
PSY 101 with a grade of “C” or higher.
1. Identify and differentiate the concepts associated with healthy and/or typical behavior and abnormal behavior.
2. Explain how psychological and physical health intersect, define adjustment disorders, and analyze factors that moderate stress and the stress response.
3. Identify and analyze key anxiety disorders and their treatments and discuss variations across cultures and populations.
4. Define dissociative and somatoform disorders, describe culture-specific syndromes, and review main treatment methods.
5. Distinguish depressive and bipolar disorders, and review treatments and factors related to suicide and non-suicidal self-injury.
6. Define substance-related conditions, identify key drugs, review causal theories, and outline treatment strategies.
7. Summarize features and treatments for eating, obesity, and sleep disorders, and examine epidemiology across groups.
8. Define gender identity challenges, sexual dysfunctions, paraphilias, and societal factors shaping normal versus abnormal sexual behavior.
9. Explain the course, symptoms, and theoretical perspectives of schizophrenia and related disorders, and describe treatment approaches.
10. Define the categories of personality disorders, discuss classification problems, and identify treatment perspectives.
11. Examine legal and ethical issues such as commitment, patient rights, the insanity defense, and criminal behavior as they relate to abnormal psychology.