Understanding Mental Disorders: Causes and Types
Causes of Mental Disorders
Various theories attempt to explain the origins of mental disorders:
- Psychoanalysis and related theories: These theories suggest that mental disorders express unconscious conflicts, often stemming from trauma experienced in childhood.
- Behaviorism and cognitive psychology: These perspectives propose that mental disorders are acquired through learning processes, leading to inappropriate interpretations or behaviors.
- Biologically inspired theories: These emphasize genetic and hormonal factors, as well as potential neurological damage.
- System integrators theories: These attempt to integrate different causal explanations. The diathesis-stress theory explains mental disorders as a combination of two factors. Systems theory takes a further step in integrating explanatory factors, including mental disorders within the broader concept of “lifestyle diseases.”
Classifications of Mental Disorders
Mood Disorders
Mood disorders involve a reduced range of emotions, with stagnation at one or the other end of the emotional spectrum. A person with depression feels extreme sadness, while mania is a state of great euphoria, loquacity, and extreme activity. Mania typically occurs within bipolar disorder, which alternates between episodes of depression and mania. Causes often include biological, psychological, and social disturbances.
Anxiety Disorders
Anxiety disorders are characterized by exaggerated or unmotivated fear reactions. Specific phobias are irrational fears in certain situations (e.g., agoraphobia, the fear of public places). Other forms of anxiety disorders are less specific.
Somatic Symptom Disorders
Somatic symptom disorders are characterized by physical symptoms that occur without any identifiable physical cause. Examples include hysteria (conversion disorder), with symptoms like false paralysis or blindness, and somatization, with symptoms like nausea, vomiting, dizziness, and chest pain.
Dissociative Disorders
Dissociation refers to separation. In dissociative disorders, a part of a personality separates or dissociates from the rest. In extreme cases, this is called multiple personality disorder. The origin of this is often a defense mechanism. A common phenomenon is “depersonalization,” where one sees oneself from the outside. Dissociative amnesia occurs when someone forgets a traumatic episode of their life, and dissociative fugue involves forgetting extending to one’s entire previous existence.
Personality Disorders
Schizoid Personality
Characterized by a lack of desire or ability for social relationships.
Paranoid Personality
Manifests as distrust and suspicion of others, whose intentions are always interpreted as malicious. These individuals often reject criticism.
Dependent Personality
Occurs in those who are unable to make decisions on their own and have minimal personal autonomy.
Avoidant Personality
Superficially similar to schizoid personality due to a tendency towards isolation. However, individuals with avoidant personality *do* desire friends and social relations, but their shyness and fear of rejection prevent them.
Narcissistic Personality Disorder
Characterized by an overly positive self-image, accompanied by fantasies of success, arrogant behaviors, and a lack of empathy towards others.
Borderline Personality
Present in impulsive and unstable individuals, with a strong tendency towards self-destruction.
Antisocial Personality Disorder
Also called psychopathy or sociopathy. It is characteristic of those who manipulate others for their own benefit and cheat, steal, or even kill without any guilt.