CFT 1 Casal II Task 3 Kami Stevens Western Governors University Advanced Pathophysiology A1 & A1a. The first one that I think needs to be discussed is Mrs. O’Neill’s “vitamins” that she takes at home. As the case manager I would want to identify all over the counter medications and vitamins that Mrs. O’Neill takes to make sure that they do not interact with the medication she has been prescribed for hypertension. I need to make sure I have this information so that when she is discharged, the medications are appropriate for her and working properly. Another issue would be Mrs. O’Neill’s poor hearing.
For example, the idea that by keeping everything abnormally clean and organised the thought that something negative will happen to you will be prevented. As these thoughts are recurring and repetitive, the compulsions that follow them are also. In order to be clinically diagnosed with OCD, these symptoms have to have been persistent for a minimum of two weeks and the other symptoms from other disorders from the Axis ll must be absent. A strength of the classification and diagnosis of OCD is that it has a very high inter-rater reliability. In the context of OCD, this measures the extent to which two different clinicians agree on the diagnosis of the same patient.
Paranoia, delusional thinking, affective flattering, and possible disorganization of the thought process are all symptoms of schizophrenia. Author, Elizabeth A. Richter, believes that people with schizophrenia can choose to cure themselves. Elizabeth A. Richter claims that 25% of people with schizophrenia will recover spontaneously without therapy. Some reliability that the author has is being that she was previously diagnosed with schizophrenia. Her experiences are personal and she uses a few famous people who suffered from the disease as examples as well.
Clinicians are often middle/upper class white males, which could affect their perception of diagnoses, hence why the women, working class individuals and ethnic minorities are more likely to diagnosed with mental illness. 14) what problems do clinicians face in diagnosing OCD when using questionnaires and interviews with patients? OCD sufferers may be dishonest about their disorder, as they feel embarrassed about it or are afraid of diagnoses. They may fear that the questionnaires are dirty and may therefore, not want any contact with it. Some patients am also be unaware about the severity and frequency of their symptoms (hence why validity in this area can be increased by interviewing close friends and relatives).
Another big theoretical view is the dopamine theory much research has been done on the neurotransmitter dopamine. According to the dopamine theory, people with schizophrenia use an abundance of dopamine, although they may not make more of it. Researchers suggest that people with schizophrenia have a large concentration of dopamine at the synapses in the brain, this maybe linked to the confusion that characterizes people with schizophrenia. Treatment for schizophrenic symptoms varies from patient to patient depending on how bad a persons schizophrenic symptom are, but the normal for people with mild schizophrenia is counseling and therapy plus medications that help control the symptoms. Some other forms of treatment is rehab, and family therapy also other people suffering from the same disorder also sometimes hospitalization is required to make sure that the medication works and the symptoms will go away.
HCA 240 A Brief History of Schizophrenia The history of schizophrenia, like the history of many mental disorders, has been a tragic tale. Swiss psychiatrist Paul Eugen Bleuler first identified and named the disease schizophrenia in 1910 (Burton, 2012). Since that time, the disease has undergone many changes in understanding. Some of the early views of the disease included Freud’s view that it resulted from unconscious conflicts from childhood. Other views led to a myriad of ineffective treatments that were often torturous to the patients including: fever therapy, sleep therapy, gas therapy, electroconvulsive or electroshock treatment, and prefrontal leucotomy (Burton, 2012).
Violence is another thing that many people like to associate with a mental illness. The statistics of mental illness is a shocking and eye opening reality check, society does not realize how many people have a form of a mental disorder in the United States. There are people in the United States who do not believe that there is a mental disorder, they actually believe there is a myth of mental illness. Understanding the concept
Origins of Abnormal Psychology The deinstitutionalization movement began in the 1960s where the number of psychiatric hospitals radically decreased and conditions for patients improved drastically (Hansell & Damour, 2008). “The blunt realities of mental illness shatter our most deeply held convictions about the nature of human consciousness and behavior. The mentally ill are more different than us than we can imagine and more like us than we care to admit” (Bosco, p. 131). Past methods of treatment used to help the mentally ill has faced a great deal of controversy in society and was clear during this era the methods previously used had negative results on both society and the patients. While in the early stages of the deinstitutionalization the methods were radical and released patients from hospitals most programs were not well thought out or implemented.
Schizophrenia Schizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by a breakdown of thought processes and by a deficit of typical emotional responses. In addition to this, some signs of schizophrenia are also associated with illnesses such as depression for example, hallucinations and delusions. Schizophrenia is also defined as a psychotic disorder with, impairments in reality, disturbances of perception and thought experienced as hallucinations, delusions, hearing voices, seeing things that are not there, and paranoia. Its onset usually starts in a person’s late teens to early twenties, and it affects about one percent of the global population. Its causes are unknown but experts are learning more every day.
This is shown in a follow up study of Whaley’s inter rater reliability correlation of +.11, by Copeland et al. Copeland carried out a study by giving descriptions of a patient to US and UK psychiatrists, he found that 69% of the US psychiatrists diagnosed SZ compared to the 2% of UK psychiatrists, proving there are issues with the reliability of diagnosis as there is such a larger % difference. Although we can argue that this study can’t be generalised to prove issues of reliability as the study only used one patient and only two countries but it does support the fact that different cultures see SZ differently. A more famous study that shows the unreliability of diagnosis is the study by Rosenham. Rosenham demonstrated the unreliability of diagnosis by sending a group of ‘pseudopatients’ to a psychiatric hospital claiming to be ‘hearing voices’.