Psychology2016

Psychological Disorders 551

THE PROS AND CONS OF LABELS With its lists of disorders and their corresponding
symptoms, the DSM-5 helps psychological professionals diagnose patients and provide
those patients with labels that explain their conditions. In the world of psychological
diagnosis and treatment, labels like depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia can be very help-
ful: They make up a common language in the mental health community, allowing psy-
chological professionals to communicate with each other clearly and efficiently. Labels
establish distinct diagnostic categories that all professionals recognize and understand,
and they help patients receive effective treatment.
However, labels can also be dangerous—or, at the very least, overly prejudicial. In
1972, researcher David Rosenhan asked healthy participants to enter psychiatric hospi-
tals and complain that they were hearing voices. All of the participants, whom Rosenhan
called “pseudopatients,” were admitted into the hospitals and diagnosed with either schizo-
phrenia or manic depression (now called bipolar disorder). Once the pseudopatients were
admitted, they stopped pretending to be ill and acted as they normally would, but the hos-
pital staff’s interpretation of the pseudopatients’ normal behavior was skewed by the label
of mental illness. For example, hospital workers described one pseudopatient’s relatively
normal relationships with family and friends as evidence of a psychological disorder, and
another pseudopatient’s note-taking habits were considered to be a pathological behavior.
The pseudopatients had been diagnosed and labeled, and those labels stuck, even when
actual symptoms of mental illness disappeared. Rosenhan concluded that psychologi-
cal labels are long-lasting and powerful, affecting not only how other people see mental
patients but how patients see themselves (Rosenhan, 1973).
Before describing the various categories and types of disorders, here is a word of cau-
tion: It’s very easy to see oneself in these disorders. Medical students often become convinced
that they have every one of the symptoms for some rare, exotic disease they have been study-
ing. Psychology students studying abnormal behavior can also become convinced that they
have some mental disorder, a problem that can be called “psychology student’s syndrome.”
The problem is that so many psychological disorders are really ordinary variations in human
behavior taken to an extreme. For example, some people are natural-born worriers. They
look for things that can go wrong around every corner. That doesn’t make them disordered—
it makes them pessimistic worriers. Remember, it doesn’t become a disorder until the worry-
ing causes them significant distress, causes them to harm themselves or others, or harms their
ability to function in everyday life. So if you start “seeing” yourself or even your friends and
family in any of the following discussions, don’t panic—all of you are probably okay.

Table 14.1 Yearly Occurrence of Psychological Disorders in the United States

CATEGORY OF DISORDER SPECIFIC DISORDER PERCENTAGE OF U.S. POPULATION AND NUMBER AFFECTED*

Bipolar and Depressive

disorders

All types

Major depressive disorder

Persistent depressive disorder (dysthymia)

Bipolar disorder

9.5% or 22.3 million

6.7% or 15.7 million

1.5% or 3.5 million

2.6% or 6.1 million

Anxiety, Obsessive-

Compulsive, and Trauma-

Related disorders

All types

Specific phobia

Social anxiety disorder (social phobia)

Panic disorder

Agoraphobia

Generalized anxiety disorder

Obsessive-compulsive

disorder

Posttraumatic stress disorder

18.1% or 42.5 million

8.7% or 20.4 million

6.8% or 16 million

2.7% or 6.3 million

0.8% or 1.9 million

3.1% or 7.3 million

1% or 2.3 million

3.5% or 8.2 million

Schizophrenia All types 1.1% or 2.6 million

*Percentage of adults over age 18 affected annually and approximate number within the population based on 2010 United States Census data.

Adapted from National Institute of Mental Health (2016). Table uses terminology from both the DSM-IV and DSM-5 (American Psychiatric Association, 2000, 2013).

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