People always fluctuate in their behavior from day to day and we all have had our times where we were rude to people, and had the pleasure of having the opposite happen too. Kay Redfield Jamison an international guru on mood disorders has had her share of mood swings during her time. For years she kept this extreme psychological disorder a secret in which she has a mood shift from being super excited known as mania, to times that she is lethargic and depressed. He actually wrote a book about these events and narrates them in more detail.
What are attitudes in sociology?
People always fluctuate in their behavior from day to day and we all have had our times where we were rude to people, and had the pleasure of having the opposite happen too. Kay Redfield Jamison an international guru on mood disorders has had her share of mood swings during her time. For years she kept this extreme psychological disorder a secret in which she has a mood shift from being super excited known as mania, to times that she is lethargic and depressed. He actually wrote a book about these events and narrates them in more detail.
By the way, it is known as bipolar disorder and affects many people around the world. With determination, strong will, and support from family and friends she overcame her struggles and continues to teach about psychological disorders to this day. I know that you may be wondering what kinds of characteristics are deviant or abnormal behavior? Well, one of the ways abnormal behavior can be diagnosed is by some common symptoms. It may surprise you that there are about 40 million Americans who are affected by some kind of psychological disorder. You might think of psychological distress as what the main character has in the movie “A Beautiful Mind.” In essence you are correct but there are many more characteristics involved and a psychological disorder can also be defined by having an addiction to a substance such as alcohol or drugs. To fully understand psychological disorders one has to analyze abnormal behavior. Let’s look at three different case studies.
Prejudice and Discrimination
A twenty-six year old woman named Helena has a need to walk a certain way. When she walked down the street in public she believed that if she stepped on certain cracks she would have bad luck, but to reverse that bad luck she had to turn around and walk back the block. She didn’t like to do this much so she often stayed home and paid people to go and fetch her groceries and other necessities.
A thirty-five year old woman recently divorced from her husband whom she had previously been married to for eleven years and had two children. Her husband has left her for her best friend and she is going back to college to continue her education so that she can earn more money to better support her children. She struggles with school work and has grown apart from her friends and peers. A lot of the time she doesn’t feel like she’s doing much and tends to cry a lot in the near future. She also has a more pessimistic outlook on life and doesn’t believe in true love anymore.
A thirty year old man named Don has to organize things in his house in a certain way. Even though she was rich enough to buy a maid she constantly had to rearrange things at her house after she left. He swept the floor and wiped the table even though he had done that before.
Most people would say that the behavior of all these individuals is abnormal, but is that all strange? It’s a common myth about behavior, because people will automatically assume that abnormal behavior is strange and that it doesn’t need to be true. Take the woman in the second case study described despite her abnormal behavior need not be strange. Often times people with abnormal behavior cannot be easily distinguished from people with normal behavior.
The last disorder, I think many Americans are aware of the last disorder and the so-called anorexia nervosa and it affects people especially Western cultures with a special emphasis on people in the United States. It is an eating disorder in which a person tries to maintain an unhealthy low body weight through starvation which can eventually lead to death.