Psychology A to Z
Here we look at some of the psychological conditions or therapies from A to Z and give a brief description
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodiverse condition that has an impact on the way you respond to the world around you and the way you think.
A mental health condition that affects mainly your mood is Bipolar Disorder where you can experience depressive episodes, manic or hypomanic episodes and/or some psychotic symptoms may be potential.
Talking therapy is a way to describe Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). With CBT you can learn different coping strategies for helping with different mental health problems. This type of therapy focuses on how your thoughts, beliefs and attitudes affect your feelings and actions.
CBT combines two types of therapy to help you deal with your thoughts and behaviours:
Cognitive therapy, studying the things you think
Behaviour therapy, studying the things you do
Having a low mood that lasts for weeks at a time and loss of interest and enjoyment in things can be termed as depression a mental health condition. Depression can also cause a range of other changes to how you feel or behave interfering with daily life. Depression symptoms can vary from milder low mood where you carry on with your daily life but feel things are harder and less worthwhile to severe depression where daily life is very difficult and suicidal feelings may occur.
Eating Disorders are very complex with not only the difficult relationship with food but not having a single cause. Some Eating Disorders may be a coping behaviour or a way to hide painful feelings or a desire for perfection. If you have an Eating Disorder this may be linked to a traumatic event or a way to cope with life changes there are many factors why an individual can suffer from an Eating Disorder.
Eating Disorders include Bulimia, Anorexia, Binge Eating, Diabulimia (affects people with type 1 Diabetes), Pica (eating things that are not food), Rumination Disorder, Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder and Other Specified Feeding or Eating Disorder.
Individuals with mental health conditions such as schizophrenia, psychosis or bipolar disorder will benefit from family help whereby the family, carers and supporters can benefit from gaining a better understanding of the nature of the illness. Family interventions can also help to improve communication and assist with goal achievement and problem solving. When families are involved it can result in the individual with the mental health condition experiencing reduced relapses and aids to promote overall functioning.
Family interventions are also appropriate if the individual with a mental health condition lives with family or has a close family involvement and/or where the family gives regular and essential care.
Grief is a natural way to feel when losing someone however intense grief can affect your mental health in many ways. You may feel extremely depressed, have disturbed sleep, become very anxious, eating habits become different eating too much or too little or comfort eating, have intense feelings of loneliness, or many other symptoms.
Individuals can suffer from 'hearing voices' which is when they hear a voice (or many different voices) when no one is present with them, or voices that other people with them cannot hear.
This can be quite a common occurrence and nothing to worry about where individuals find the voices comforting or helpful. Others however have a very different experience whereby the voices are intrusive and frightening and can be a symptom of mental health conditions such as psychosis
For individuals with depression Interpersonal Therapy (IPT) can help identify and address issues in their relationships with family, partners and friends. IPT is a talking therapy with the strategy of helping people where they are feeling depressed due to poor relations ships with their depression making them feel worse.
Individuals can experience burnout related to their job and seek help to ease their symptoms of both physical and emotional exhaustion. Therapy can help to identify coping strategies and ways of changing behaviours to aid in relieving stress.
There are many different types of psychological therapies such as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), dialectical behavioural therapy (DBT), eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy, to name but a few. When talking to your psychologist who is a professionally clinically trained expert they will guide you after talking to you about your thoughts, feelings and behaviours as to which approach is best to help you.
The feeling of loneliness is not a mental health problem. However, feeling of loneliness can increase if you have a mental health problem. Loneliness is not the same as being alone and is a different, personal experience for many – you may have lots of social contact and support but feel lonely with feelings of being misunderstood or cared for by those around you.
Mindfulness is a technique to help you feel less stressed, able to cope with unhelpful or difficult thoughts, become more self-aware and kinder to yourself. The Mindfulness technique with its roots in Buddhism and meditation helps individuals by noticing what is happening in the present moment, without judgement and away from other thoughts.
Nature can benefit your mental health as spending time in green spaces or bringing nature into your everyday life can make your mood improve, feel more relaxed, reduce feelings of stress or anger, etc. Connecting with nature can also improve your physical wellbeing.
A mental health condition is Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) which has two main parts that are connected, obsessions and compulsions.
Obsessions can be described as unwelcome thoughts, feelings, images, urges, worries or doubts that keep coming into your mind. These obsessions may feel stuck in your mind, no matter what you do. You may worry what they mean or why they won't go away, and feel very distressed by these obsessions.
Compulsions are repetitive actions you carry out to reduce the distress or uncertainty caused by obsessions. Compulsions can be things you do physically, like repeatedly checking a door is locked. Or they can be things you do in your head, like repeating a specific word to yourself. Or they may involve others, such as asking people for reassurance.
Your compulsions might make you feel better initially. However, you may find the more you do a compulsion, the stronger the urge is to repeat it. This can lead to an unhelpful cycle of thoughts, feelings and behaviours.
After experiencing traumatic events the mental health condition Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may be experienced. PTSD was initially a condition that was seen in war veterans after their traumatic war experiences. PTSD has had various names in the past, such as 'shell shock', but it's not only diagnosed in soldiers. A broad range of traumatic experiences can be causes of PTSD.
When experiencing an traumatic event it is understandable to have some of the symptoms of PTSD which is sometimes known as an ‘acute stress reaction”. These symptoms tend to dissipate after a few weeks however if they last longer than a month and your symptoms are severe you may have PTSD.
Questionnaires are used when carrying out psychological assessments to gain an understanding of how individual’s feel about certain situations as well as gathering information regarding the individual’s history and circumstances. These questionnaires are an important part of the assessment and when completing an individual with a mental health condition needs to take time to complete them as acutely as possible.
Questionnaires for Autism for example include the Camouflaging Autistic Traits Questionnaire (CAT-Q) questionnaire which looks at how an individual with Autism masks certain autistic characteristics, uses certain strategies to try to fit in and compensates for difficulties in certain social situations.
One question many people ask in therapy is when will I recover from my mental health condition? The answer varies dependent on the severity of the mental health condition but overall it is possible to learn different self-care techniques and have treatments that work for you to feel more confident to manage your symptoms. The term recovery however does not necessarily mean going back to experiencing how life was before your mental health difficulties occurred but gaining control of elements of your life that felt out of control and learning new ways to manage your life for example recognising triggers and using new techniques to live the life you want to live.
If feeling threatened or under pressure a reaction is stress which is where usually you do not feel able to manage or control a situation. The feeling of being stressed is not a mental health condition but is connected with mental health as it can cause an existing mental health condition to worsen such as depression or anxiety. Stress may occur whilst finding ways of coping with symptoms of mental health problems such as managing medication or treatments.
Stress in small amounts is often a natural occurrence to help complete tasks and feel invigorated but can be a problem if stress is very intense (acute) or lasts for a long time (chronic) or keeps coming back.
Trichotillomania is a mental health condition that involves frequent, repeated and irresistible urges to pull out hair from your scalp, eyebrows or other areas of your body. Trichotillomania can also be classified as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) although it does not involve obsessions but feelings of reward as the action of hair pulling can make the individual feel relief or other positive emotions which are not OCD feelings.
It is believed that improvements in our lives can be gained when putting into practice changes needed when understanding ourselves better. Through the years, philosophers have tried to understand the nature of humanity, examining issues such as self-knowledge, truth, beliefs and goodness. Psychologists have contributed to the wealth of knowledge we have about how and why people behave and experience the world around them in the ways they do.
An understanding of interactions between our thoughts, feelings and behaviour can aid to help us change how we think about certain situations changing the way we feel about them.
Values in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), relates to a set of ideas which are important to us as individuals in the context of our lives. By identifying our Values we are then able to identify behaviours which are consistent with them – to take the action that matters to us in the service of living our value based life.
Values can refer to…
Living your life based on what’s important to you
Doing what truly matters
The things that give our lives purpose
Therefore, Values in ACT means to understand the deeper things that are important to us and choosing to live our lives in way that closely aligns with them.
When thinking about your wellbeing it does not have an exact meaning and having good wellbeing doesn’t mean you are always happy. Wellbeing can be the way we feel, how well we cope with daily life or what feels possible presently.
It is so important to have healthy lifestyle behaviours that promote psychological wellbeing and adopting these can help ease or prevent mental health disorders.
Improved mental health can be linked to a higher frequency of physical and mental activity, moderate alcohol intake (i.e. not increased or no alcohol consumption), non-smoking, a body mass index within the range of normal to overweight (i.e. not underweight or obese) and a regular life rhythm. The more healthy lifestyle choices an individual makes, the higher life satisfaction and lower psychological distress they will tend to experience.
Ultimately, it is your choice when you are ready to seek therapy and to take the steps to talk to a psychologist about your mental health difficulties. During therapy you will learn different ways of for example processing a traumatic event or different coping strategies it is your choice when you engage in making changes and moving forward to a better understanding and new ways of coping once you have learnt these new skills.
Individuals with ADHD can find themselves side-tracked or not focused on their external surroundings and tasks. Zoning out is usually an involuntary process, but it can be especially difficult for people with ADHD to bring themselves back into the current moment. ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder) affects an individual’s ability to filter through incoming information.
Having ADHD can mean individuals zone out for various reasons, but it’s usually tied to how their brain filters and regulates attention and information. In neurotypical individuals, zoning out can be caused by sleep deprivation or stress. In all cases, it’s involuntary. As much as you’re trying to be attentive, your brain can switch off without notice.
Individuals with ADHD may zone out more than neurotypical people as they typically have brains that function differently in relation to their brain attention networks.