All That You Want to Know About Abnormal Psychology

Psychology is the examination of how people act and why they act that way. Put two people in the same situation and they often respond differently, shaped by whatever surroundings they came from. The researchers who study all this are trained psychological specialists.

Their interest runs across a wide range: emotions, patterns of thought, perception, how someone learns, what drives them, memory and reasoning, personality type, and at the far end, behavior that strikes us as out of the ordinary. That last category is where abnormal psychology comes in. When conduct strays far from what most people do, it gets labeled as unusual, and studying it became its own field. You might also hear it described as probabilistic deviation. At any given age or stage of life, there is a rough expectation of how a person will act. Step outside that band of expected behavior and you may be seen as abnormal. Often people act oddly because of several things happening at once, and the result is a shift in how they think and how they respond emotionally to what life throws at them.

There is also personal distress to consider, where someone's own behavior and thinking leave them ill at ease. Specialists have a term for this trouble: maladaptiveness. It splits into two directions, being maladaptive toward yourself or toward society. Someone maladaptive toward self is usually passing through a stretch where they feel they have fallen short. Goals go unmet, and a sense of worthlessness creeps in. They start to see themselves as failures because they could not keep up with what life asked of them.

Being maladaptive toward society is the other side of it, the inability to find a place within social groups. It gets in the way of connecting with other people. Environmental pressures and emotional ones can both feed it, and both tend to generate stress. Much of abnormal psychology surfaces as depression, so a great many of its symptoms mirror what depressed people live with. A person might carry obsessions, disordered eating, mood swings, flaws of character, sexual abnormalities, or anxiety disorders, the last sometimes grouped as neuroses. Anxiety disorders themselves break into four kinds. First is generalized anxiety disorder, marked by restlessness, nervousness, a feeling of helplessness, and paranoia. Panic disorder is the second, where sufferers are hit by panic attacks. Those attacks arrive as sudden, overwhelming tension out of nowhere, pushing the person to act in strange ways.

Third on the list is obsessive-compulsive disorder, defined by thoughts that repeat, persist, and refuse to be shut off, often with a ritual quality. People with it may feel compelled to do one task over and over in a set way. They might clean endlessly, or keep returning in conversation to catastrophe or death. The fourth kind is phobic disorder, where the fear is irrational. A simple phobia fixes on a single thing, while a complex phobia spreads across many. Beyond these, a person dealing with abnormal psychology may show somatization disorders, which center on strange physical behavior. Schizophrenia sits in this group of disorders too. Treatment usually starts with a psychologist, who may offer counseling to the person affected. When things are severe, medication and a hospital stay can be called for so the situation stays under watch.