In this lecture, we're going to finally turn to the study of clinical psychology, which is the study of mental illnesses and how to treat them, often known as psychopathology. For many of you, this is what psychology is all about. When I meet a stranger on a plane, for instance, and they ask me what I do and I say I'm a psychologist, they might think of me as somebody who treats people and they ask, "What sort of problems do you deal with?" While we now know there's so much more to psychology than this, it's certainly true that clinical psychology is a central aspect of our field. Its central for obvious reasons because the mental illnesses are extremely important and extremely relevant. Both from a theoretical perspective, if you're interested in how the mind works, but of course more practical perspective because of the seriousness of these problems. Some very large proportion of people, by some estimates about a half, will have some sort of mental problem throughout your development. If you're not directly affected by mental illness, there's people you love who have. So, to set the stage. Let's think about what we're talking about, when we're talking about mental disorders because we could be talking a lot of things. So, right psychologists use the diagnostic and standard manual file. This is the most recent, there might be, if sometime has gone by since I did this lecture, they might have something more advanced. What you find in these pages is a lot of things, this includes some crazy people muttering on the streets as in schizophrenia. It might include personal down syndrome or autism. An elderly person with dementia. Somebody with a depression so bad that they can't get out of bed. Somebody for social phobia who's profoundly awkward around people. Someone who's a paranoid schizophrenics, maybe who meets the sort of ultimate stereotype of the mentally ill who might believe that his or her thoughts are being monitored by the CIA. All sorts of things. You know what you're dealing with here. There are reasonably clear cases of what it's like to have a mental illness. But they're also difficult cases. So, for instance, what do you deal with a successful criminal? Like Bernie Madoff, for instance, who swindled people edited their life savings. Is evil, where does evil ends and mental illness begins? To take a fictional case which often interest psychologists, is Batman mentally ill? He devotes his life to helping others. He's a successful multimillionaire in Gotham City, but he gets around on one hour of sleep at night. He dresses like a bat. He's fully knowledgeable that a lot of his behaviors are due to a post-traumatic stress disorder after witnessing the murder of his parents. Some of you are attics, is this a mental illness? The DSM categorize as such what some of you might push back. What about sex addiction. What about being a workaholic. What about eating too much. Whereas illness end and free will begin? This isn't just a philosophical problem, it's an everyday problem. Your insurance companies for instance, pay for illnesses, they reimburse you for your treatments. Unanswered the question of what an illness is? Is a matter of some social importance and what illness is, for instance, also affects whether the government programs like Medicare and Medicaid will pay for. It affects everyday life too. Suppose I'm teaching a large class and a student says, "I'm sorry about my getting in my paper late, but don't dock my grade, I had a panic attack or I had a schizophrenics break." Well, I definitely say, "I feel terrible for you. Don't worry about it. I hope you're getting good treatment." On the other hand, if my students said, they didn't do the paper on time because they were out late searching for sexual partners because of their sex addiction, I would have a different response. So, how do we think about mental illness? Well, here are some possibilities. One ancient view was it's due to demonic possession, and that's not true. [inaudible] people [inaudible] with schizophrenia being schizophrenics, as being possessed by the devil, I don't need to explain to you the data doesn't support that. Another view worth talking about as a sort of cynical view, which is that the labels of mental illness or what we do to people who deviate from us socially. It's worth taking seriously because, for instance, in many countries, including what used to be the Soviet Union, dissidents, people who protested against the governments were put in insane asylums. As an example that comes closer to home, people with certain sexual desires, including homosexuality used to be counted as mentally ill by the psychological and psychiatric community. It was only in 1973 for instance, that being gay was no longer counted as a mental illness. It supports people like the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, who in his book The Myth of Mental Illness said, "Mental illness is a myth. We call people sick mentally ill if they deviate from society, and the label of mental illness deprives them of responsibility and dismisses them." There is a recent debate for instance over neuro diversity which takes a similar tag. Which argues that different ways of being, for instance being mildly autistic isn't an illness in any interesting sense, but more just a diverse aspects of different way of processing information in dealing with the world, one that deserves respect. On the other hand, it'll be pretty clear that these really are illnesses in a very real sense. They lead up to lack of functioning, clearly. They're often associated with brain damage or brain trauma or unusual neurochemistry. Maybe most important with treatment, people become happier, and more competent and better able to deal with the world. So, this supports what's called the medical model of mental illness, where you think in terms of symptoms and an underlying disorder which is ultimately treated. So, I'm going to go through the major classes of mental illness and major mental illnesses and I'll just talk very briefly about each one, and then I'll move to the more optimistic question of treatment, how do we fix people with these disorders?
