Psychopathology And The Concept Of Psychopathology

Psychopathology is what goes wrong with the mind. It is distress related to mental processes and statistical deviations from the norm. Psychopathology is what clinicians treat and researchers research (quoted in Frances & Widiger, 2012). Psychopathology has many possible definitions because it does not exist in a vacuum—the context affects the definition. Common themes in possible definitions include distress, dysfunction, disability, and dyscontrol, but none of these quite capture the whole picture (Frances & Widiger, 2012). What if a person is not distressed, but their behavior is clearly maladaptive, for example someone with antisocial personality disorder who manipulates others to achieve their goals? Is this person not pathological? Of
Such forces may lead to overdiagnosis or an “unintended medicalization of normality” that reduces the validity of the concept of psychopathology (Frances & Widiger, 2012). But physicians and clinicians operate with an understandable bias for making false positive diagnoses over false negatives, which is likely reflected in their definitions of disorder. Nowhere is that clearer than in Rosenhan’s 1973 study on the “sane in insane places.” Professionals are the ones defining psychopathology on a daily basis through diagnosis and treatment, and they are biased by setting (the institutions they work in) and prior diagnoses—once a patient had a label, they were stuck with it. As Rosenhan (1973) concluded, “Psychiatric diagnosis betrays little about the patient but much about the environment in which an observer finds
Clark (2005) found three temperament dimensions that underlie both personality and psychopathology: negative affectivity, positive affectivity, and disinhibition. Her theory is that these temperaments differentiate during development, becoming specific traits, and that the sharing of these traits with certain environmental factors leads to specific personality-disorder associations. Her temperament dimensions bear a resemblance to factor analytic studies that have found DSM disorders to divide into two or three dimensions: negative affectivity (internalization), externalization (disinhibition), and psychotic experiences (Widiger & Samuel, 2005; Wright et al., 2013). Mood, anxiety, and many personality disorders map onto the negative affectivity dimension, while substance use and antisocial disorders map onto the externalization dimension (Widiger & Samuel,