Out of Balance: Experiencing Psychological Disorders
Stephen Hinshaw and Kay Redfield Jameson share their experiences with bipolar illness, one as a child whose father suffered from the disease, the other from a very personal point of view. The line between normality and abnormality is blurry, as one ...
Out of Balance: Labeling Psychological Disorders
The psychiatry profession has created a mechanism for classifying psychological disorders, often referred to as DSM. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Psychiatric Disorders uses behavioral definitions to help mental health workers diagnose p...
Out of Balance: Personality Disorders
Personality itself can become distorted to the point that psychological dysfunction becomes tightly interwoven with an individual's patterns of behavior. Such disorders are principally developmental in origin. There are a number of psychological ill...
Out of Balance: Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Obsessive compulsive disorder is a condition in which people experience recurrent, unwanted thoughts they find disturbing. It is usually associated with compulsive rituals like hand washing to neutralize an obsession with cleanliness and a fear of d...
Out of Balance: Anxiety Disorders
Fear and anxiety are part of the normal human condition. It's when the alarm system that protects us from danger starts malfunctioning that we have anxiety disorders and the host of subcategories that fall within this category. Generalized anxiety d...
Out of Balance: Emotionless Schizoid Disorder
People with emotionless schizoid disorders find it difficult to relate to anyone at all. In order to protect themselves they will set up relationships at a distance or no relationship at all which presents all kinds of substantive problems in their ...
Out of Balance: Panic Attacks
A panic attack is the rapid mobilization of the fight or flight fear response that creates fear as a result of the body's response. People fear they are losing control, or dying from a stroke or heart attack. People with panic disorder become so fri...
Out of Balance: Phobias
Many people are afraid of public speaking and go to great lengths to avoid it. Others are frightened of most social situations and avoid as many public events as possible. The concept of social cost is often at work. Should I make a mistake when I'm...
Going to Extremes: Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia is a disorder in which people lose touch with reality. It commonly strikes in late adolescence after an apparently normal childhood. Thinking becomes fragmented; ideas are irrational, delusional and bizarre. Schizophrenia patients show...
Going to Extremes: Prenatal Factors and Schizophrenia
Maternal viral infections and stress during pregnancy appear to increase the likelihood of risk for schizophrenia. Stressors that occur after birth do not play the same role. Studies of identical twins, one with and one without schizophrenia reveal ...