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Psychopathology is a branch of psychiatry and clinical psychology dealing with the description, explanation and ordering of atypical, abnormal and pathological psychological phenomena. The subject of psychopathology in a broad sense are mental disorders. Psychopathology provides descriptions of these disorders for a given purpose – i.e. idiographic descriptions (description of the specific features of a given phenomenon) or nomothetic (trying to find general regularities and relationships in the case of a given disorder).
Criteria used by psychopathology
In psychopathology, criteria are used to distinguish between normal behaviors (phenomena) and those classified as pathological. These criteria are as follows:
- pathological phenomenon causes suffering,
- the pathological phenomenon has a negative impact on the functioning of the individual in society,
- a pathological phenomenon causes a loss of control over one’s own behavior and makes the behavior unpredictable,
- the pathological phenomenon causes psychological discomfort in the observing person,
- a pathological phenomenon violates the norms in force in a given society,
- the pathological phenomenon is assessed as irrational or bizarre,
- the pathological phenomenon is assessed as unconventional.
Of course, not all of the above criteria have to be met in order to qualify a given phenomenon as a psychopathological phenomenon – in most cases it is enough to meet one of these conditions.
Classification of mental diseases and disorders used in psychopathology
The department of psychiatry and clinical psychology dealing with pathological mental phenomena has two diagnostic systems allowing for the classification of mental disorders. These are:
- DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Clinical Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association, and
- ICD-10 or the International Classification of Diseases and Health Problems, version 10, published by the World Health Organization.
Classification of psychopathological symptoms
Psychopathology uses the following classification of disorders and their symptoms:
- Cognitive impairment, which includes disturbance in attention (for example, difficulty concentrating), memory disturbances such as hypermnesia, hypomnesia, amnesia and exmnesia (quantitative disturbances), memory delusions and hallucinations, cryptomnesia and confabulation (qualitative memory disturbances), perception disturbances such as hallucinations, pseudohallucinations and parahallucinations, illusions, derealizations, depersonalization, deja vu, jamais vu, and perception deficits and eidetic experiences. Cognitive disorders also include thinking disorders such as delusions, intrusive thoughts, overvalued thoughts, mental automatisms and magical thinking, as well as clutter of thoughts, word of mouth, slowness of thinking, inconsistency in thinking, slipping and jumping of thinking, paralogical thinking, perseveration, stereotypes, mutism and impoverishment of thinking.
- Disorders of emotional and motivational activities, which include depressed mood (depressive mood, dysthymic mood), elevated mood (e.g. manic, euphoric, moriatic mood), anxiety, irritability, emotional indifference, emotional impoverishment, hypoensitivity, lingering feelings, stickiness emotional, emotional instability (lability), violent and changeable emotional reactions, synthymia, paratymia and catatimia as well as disturbances in motivational activities such as lowered and increased motivational drive, psychomotor agitation, iterations and motor stereotypes, intrusive activities, wax flexibility, automatism, negativity catatonic and dysfunctional libido – for example, eating disorders (anorexia, hyperorexia, bulimia), libido disorders and sleep disorders. Motivational disorders also include disorders of mental functions merging, such as disturbances of consciousness, pathological sleepiness, narrowing of consciousness and confusion, and dissociative symptoms (disorders of memory, identity and perception), disturbances in orientation in time and space, disturbances in intellectual performance and broadly understood personality disorders. .
What disorders are diagnosed by psychopathology?
Psychopathology distinguishes and classifies a number of personality disorders and psychopathological syndromes. It also provides the appropriate tools to diagnose them. Among the disorders whose diagnosis and treatment methods are dealt with in psychopathology, there are dementia syndrome, hallucinations, paranoid, depressive, addiction, delusional, paranoid, mental disorganization, manic, phobic, dissociative and generalized anxiety syndromes.
Descriptions of these disorders provided by psychopathology are supplemented on an ongoing basis, the proposals for their treatment methods are also modified, which change with the progress of medicine and the development of knowledge about the human psyche and the human nervous system.