Psychopathology Essay

Submitted By maymayjon
Words: 759
Pages: 4

The topic of my project is psychopathology. According to the Greek term, psych means "mind" and pathos means "suffering". The definition of Psychopathology is the science of mental disorders. People often refer it as Clinician Psychopathology. Some background information is that current etiologic research in psychiatry are based on specific theoretical conceptions of mental processes, brain structure and function, and their interconnecting links. It's difficult to evaluate this disease because it covers different layers of causes. Some Mental disorder's causes are multi factorial, which means in order to have the disease, one must have more than one of the following damage: genetics, brain, social influence, traumatic events, and environment. We can also explain this situation by using the Bronfenbrenner’s model. This model contains different layers of systems from microsystem, mesosystems, exosystem to macrosystem. This model explains that in order to create a psychopath, he or she must be influence or trigger by each layer. It can be home, or sibling, which would fall under microsystem. Furthermore, religious setting would fall under mesosystem. As it goes further out, it covers broader areas of society. Some complications of this disease can lead to either good or bad consequences. If you have moderate symptoms of a psychopath, such as impulsivity and organized, he or she may possess a superior position in the workforce because these symptoms or attitude push you forward and stand out from the ordinary people. However, if one has the extreme symptoms of a psychopath, he or she may end up with criminal activities because the lack of self-control. Furthermore, psychopaths tend to use emotional information as neutral information. There was a study done in the VA hospital in Bronx, New York under directions of Dr. Joanna. They used the SPECT study to examine the brains of the psychopaths. "In this process harmless amount of radioactive tracers are injected into a subject bloodstream, activity and specific area of the brain can then be observed. The white and red area indicate the highest mental activity, the green and blue indicate green and blue activity." The given task for the tester is to press the red button in their hands when they see a word pops up in the screen as quickly as possible. After the result came out, a none psychopath individual shows a wide spread of brain activity. Many parts of the brain have to be activated at the same time, but most of the activity toward the front part of the brain. For the emotional words, there were strong activation on the right hemisphere it plays an important role in processing negative emotion, negative effect. However, if you look at the psychopath, the part of the brain that was activated the most was the cerebral cortex. According to the scientist, " It's pretty hard for normal individual to see a word like cancer, rape or death without drawing other associations. You may have a image subconsciously of what's going on this may activate parts of the brain.