The+Most+Important+People+Who+Have+Contributed+to+Psychopathology

**__T he Most Important People Who Have Contributed to Psychopathology__ ** The [|Renaissance] period was a time period where psychopathology became a topic of interest. The German physician, **Johann Weyer**, is considered to be the founder of modern [|psychopathology]. ** [|Psychiatrists] ** **and clinical psychologists** are interested in psychopathology.

**Philippe Pinel** is also considered a founder of psychiatry but he is more famously known as a major advocate of humane treatment of the mentally ill. After attaining a degree in medicine he switched his focus to mental illness after a friend of his went mad in 1785 and ran into the countryside where he was later eaten by the wolves. In 1793 he was appointed the director of Bicetre Asylum in Paris. Shortly after he began improving the shocking conditions he found there. He unchained patients,improved their rations, stopped bloodletting and forbade harsh treatments. He also was responsible for many innovations regarding treatment of the mentally ill. He separated patients according to their illnesses, was a huge supporter of occupational therapy, and encouraged bathing and mild purgatives as forms of physical treatment. He was also against punishment and exorcism. Pinel was also the first to maintain case histories and statistics of patients, including cure rate (Hergenhahn, 2009). He believed that his patients were human beings and should be treated as such. He felt that if reason had deserted them due to severe personal and/or social problems, it could be restored to them through "comforting counsel and purposeful activity" (Davison et. al., 2010). While he made many advances in the treatment and care of mental patients, he only reserved the more humanitarian treatment for the upper classes and the lower classes were still subjected to terror and coercion. On May 13th, 1785 he was appointed chief physician of Hospice de la Salpetriere and maintained that position for the rest of his life. While Pinel was advancing the care and treatment of the mentally ill in Paris, Benjamin Rush was working to do the same thing in the U.S. Although better known as a signer of the Declaration of Independence, Rush is also distinguished as the first U.S. psychiatrist In 1812, he wrote Medical Inquiries and Observations Upon the Diseases of the Mind, in which he asserted that people with mental illnesses were treated like criminals. Like Pinel, he felt patients should be unchained and no longer punished. He also believed they should regularly be exposed to fresh air, sunlight, and walks outside and that they should never be put on display to the public (Hergenhahn, 2000). Unlike Pinel, Rush advocated the use of bloodletting and rotating and tranquilizing chairs, due largely in part to his belief that mental illness was caused by disruptions of blood circulation. He took patients in the U.S. out of the dungeon-like facilities they were in and put them in more acceptable hospital settings. Rush was one of the fist people to describe Savant Syndrome. In 1789, he wrote about the abilities of one Thomas Fuller who was a lightning calculator. He also pioneered the therapeutic approach to addiction. Instead of blaming the alcoholic for his or her behavior, he believed an alcoholic loses control over him/herself and blamed the properties of alcohol itself. He developed the concept of alcoholism as a medical disease and thought that alcoholics should be weaned off alcohol using less potent substances (Hergenhahn, 2009).  media type="youtube" key="GdxlFlAcJzw?version=3" height="349" width="425"

**Jean Etienne Esquirol** was a student of Philippe Pinel, and studied descriptive psychopathology and postnatal depression. He followed Pinel as a physician at Salpetriere Hospital, in Paris. Esquirol gave the first description of mental retardation as something different than insanity, and created the term hallucination.

**Lightner Witmer** is another who is often distinguished as the founder of clinical psychology. He believed that psychology should provide practical information. In 1896 he founded the world's first psychological clinic and the University of Pennsylvania. In 1907 he founded Psychological Clinic journal, which was instrumental in promoting and defining the clinical psychology profession (Hergenhahn, 2009). He was the first to use the term clinical psychology and through his journal he defined the field, publicized it, and attracted younger people to it. In addition to his work in clinical psychology, he also contributed to school psychology and special education. He performed little experiments on his subjects and studied the results to determine where their difficulties lied. He then attempted educational experiments and evaluated their effectiveness over varied periods of times. He believed the correct educational approach in dealing with learning disabilities was to teach to weakness. His journal continued being published until 1935.

Within our book //__Forty Studies that Changed Psychology__// under Psychopathology there are four sub-sections with individuals worth mentioning.

__Who’s Crazy Here, Anyway__?

**Rosenhan. D. L**. questioned whether the personality that leads to psychological diagnoses were those in patients or if they were caused by situations and the context around them. This question began the thought of psychopathology. Spitzer (1976) pointed out that while the individuals in Rosenhan’s experiment now behaved normally; they did at one point tell the hospital they were having these symptoms. This does not mean the staff wasn’t doing their job, they were doing what they were told to do. Thomas Szasz, who is a psychiatrist, used Rosenhan’s study findings as a way to challenge the mental health professionals when it comes to diagnoses of mental health patients. He says that in the case of these test subjects, them talking to themselves doesn’t automatically mean they have schizophrenia, it just means that the mental health staff doesn’t understand the patient, therefore they put them into a mental hospital. Another study that started from the results of Rosenhan’s study was by Broughton & Chesterman, (2001). In this study, it is pointed out that mental health experts assume whatever the patient says is how they are feeling. They stressed the fact that we have to be careful that criminals are not faking illnesses to get out of jail or further punishment (Hock, 2005).
 * Rosenhan did a study involving eight individuals, including himself. All being studied went to the hospital complaining of the same thing: hearing voices that said “empty, hollow and thud”. All individuals were committed as having Schizophrenia. Once they were in the mental health hospital they all acted normal, and the study was to see how long they would stay committed before the workers realized that they were not mentally ill. The individuals were contained in the mental ward anywhere from 7 to 52 days. This was a turning point in psychopathology because it showed that the sane could not be changed by the insane when they were put into a mental facility together. Secondly, this showed the danger of labeling individuals with a mental illness before doing a little research. Rosenhan did this study many times in 12 different hospitals.

__You’re Getting Defensive Again__

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 110%;">The main person of interest is Sigmund Freud’s daughter, **Anne Freud**, who was a psychoanalyst and wrote the book //The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense.// Anne Freud got the framework of her book by her father, Sigmund Freuds’, work. Freud believed that an individuals personality consisted of three aspects; the id, ego, and superego. The id is referred to as the “devil,” it deals with the basic needs: hunger, thirst and sex. The ego is referred to the “angel,” it operates on the reality principle that knows the difference between right and wrong. Finally, the superego balances the other two out and operates on conscious and unconscious levels. Everyone has all three of these personalities inside them. Freud believes that the reason why people don’t act antisocial and deviant is because of the combination of these three personalities. Freud believes defense mechanisms are to prevent the id’s prohibited desires from entering the bodies’ consciousness. Anne Freud identified ten defense mechanisms, five which are repression, regression, projection, reaction formation, and sublimation. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 110%;">Anne Freud stated that defense mechanisms are often associated with neurotic behavior, but this should not always the case. Nearly everyone uses defense mechanisms to get through their day to day activities, and not everyone should be linked to neurotic behavior. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 110%;">Nevertheless, too much of any defense mechanism isn’t good for you. For example, too much repression can be linked to phobias, anxiety attacks, or obsessive-compulsive disorders (Hock, 2005).
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 110%;">Repression is when an individual forces thoughts out of the consciousness. Freud says that repression is the most important defense mechanism.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 110%;">Regression is used by the ego to help prevent anxiety. This is done by going back to an earlier stage in life where it was easier and safer.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 110%;">Projection is when an individual projects their behavior onto others; this happens when you id is attaching to the ego.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 110%;">Reaction Formation is when an individual engages in behaviors that are the complete opposite of what the id wants.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 110%;">Sublimation, unlike the other four, is believed to be normal but desirable. Sublimation is a person’s way to find socially acceptable ways to get rid of energy.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 110%;">Cramer (2003) says that projection can be linked to lower blood pressure.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 110%;">Adams, Wright, & Lohr (1996) did a study that has shown that homophobia, an irrational fear of gay or lesbians, may be a reaction formation used to ward off the feelings of their own homosexuality. In this particular study homophobic and non-homophobic men were told to view particular videos. The only difference in the men' reactions was when they viewed videos of gay men. The study’s results are consistent with Anna Freud’s explanation of reaction formation (Hock, 2005).

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 110%;">**Carl Jung** was one of the main theorists in psychoanalysis. His major disagreement with Freud was over the concept of libido. Freud defined libido as sexual energy and thus believed that most behavior was sexually motivated. Jung, however, defined libido as a creative life force that could be applied to individual's psychological growth. Libido, therefore, motivated a wide range of behavior not just behavior of a sexual nature. It satisfies both biological and spiritual needs. Jung's concept of ego was similar to Freud's in that he defined it as the mechanism that facilitates our interaction with the physical environment. Jung placed a lot of emphasis on a person's unconscious. The personal unconscious consists of experiences that have been either repressed or forgotten. The collective unconscious is the deepest and most powerful component of personality and reflects the cumulative experiences of humans throughout the evolutionary past. It registers the common experiences that humans have had throughout the last eons. (Hergenhahn, 2000) The collective unconscious contains many different archetypes, which Jung defined as inherited predispositions. The persona archetype makes people show only part of their personality to the public. The anima provides the female component of male personality and framework within which males can interact with females and the animus is the reverse. (Hergenhan, 2009). The shadow archetype causes people to be aggressive and immoral and is acquired from pre-human ancestors. When people try to synthesize all components of the personalities together it is the self archetype, and self actualization occurs when those parts are actually synthesized into a harmonious unity. Jung believed there were two major orientations or attitudes that people had when it comes to relating to the world. Introversion causes someone to be quiet, imaginative and idea-oriented, while a person leaning towards extroversion is more outgoing and sociable. He believed that in order to truly understand a person you must first understand their prior experiences. Synchronicity is when two or more meaningful but independent events occur together in a significant way. Dream analysis was very important to Jung. He thought dreams were a way to express underdeveloped aspects of the psyche. By analyzing dreams, it can be determined which aspects of the psyche are given adequate expression and which are not. In his memoir Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung wrote that meaning come "when people feel they are living in the symbolic life, that they are actors in divine drama. That gives the only meaning to human life; everything else is banal and you can dismiss it. A career, producing of children, are all maya (illusion) compared to that one thing, that your life is meaningful. " <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 110%;">** Alfred Adler ** believed that every disorder is assumed to have a physiological origin; he also believes that people are born with weaknesses but the environment has an effect on the function of the weakness. Alder states that there are two ways to overcome any given weakness; by either compensation or overcompensation. Compensation is when you develop strong parts of your body to counter balance the weak parts of your body. Overcompensation is when you covert the weakness into a strength. He also says that when babies come into the world they are completely dependent on other people which cause feelings of inferiority. These feelings cause people to gain power, and become perfectionists. Adler’s thoughts were different then Freud and Jung, he believed that humans aren’t victims of biological inheritance or the environment. He says that even though humans are dealt a specific set of cards they can deal with them any way they want. Adler finally came up with a theory; his theory emphasized the conscious mind, social motives other than sexual motives, and free will.

<span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 110%;">**Karen Horney** believed in unconscious sexual motivation, id, ego and superego, but stated that it didn’t help her clients during the depression era. Horney thought that mental illness was found in social interactions and society, and needed therapy to work out these problems. She believed that the relationship between parents and children are the most important and that the parents should provide two things for their children: basic biological needs and for the children to be safe from danger, pain and fear. If those two things are met she believed the children would be normal adults, but if they weren’t met the children will experience basic evil, and will become neurotic. Children that experience basic evil eventually develop basic hostility towards the parents. When a basic hostility is reserved it becomes basic anxiety, a common factor in neurosis. Individuals with basic anxiety need to cope, and they do it in three ways: <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 110%;">Healthy individuals use a combination of these three to deal with life. Horney and Freud did see eye to eye on the importance of childhood experiences and unconscious drive but differed on the emphasis of biological drive. <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 110%;">Horney was also involved with Feminine Psychology; she stated that women are culturally inferior to men, not biologically. In a nutshell, Horney was influenced by Freud, but when it came to women she disagreed with him about everything.
 * <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 110%;">Moving towards people and becoming the compliant type
 * <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 110%;">Moving against people and becoming the hostile type
 * <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 110%;">Moving away from people and becoming the detached type

<span style="color: #ff0000; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 110%;">__Learning to be Depressed__

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 110%;">**Martin Seligman** is a well know behavioral psychologist who projected that our awareness of control and power are learned from experiences. He went on to say that if a person fails at something over and over again, they might just stop trying to control that factor completely. If this happens for many different events in a persons life, they might feel that they can’t control anything and a person begins to feel like a pawn of fate and becomes depressed and helpless. Seligman said this is called depression, or learned helplessness. He conducted an experiment with a colleague named **Steven Maier**; they conducted the research on dogs. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 110%;">In this experiment there were 24 dogs split up into 3 groups of 8: one group was the escape group, one was the no-escape group and one was the no-harness control group. The dogs in the no-escape and escape groups were placed in individual harness, enough to still let them move. The dogs in the escape group had a panel on each side of their head to keep their head looking forward. When the examiners delivered an electrical shock the escape group could escape the shock by moving their head side to side, but the no-escape group couldn’t escape the shock, no matter what they did. The dogs with no harnesses on were not used for this part of the experiment. The next day all the dogs were tested again in boxes similar to the ones they were in the day before, they set up this experiment by having a light turn on and 10 seconds later the dogs would get an electrical shock. If the light came on and the dogs jumped before 10 seconds, they wouldn’t get the electrical shock. Each dog was given 10 trials. Learning was measured by how much time it took the dogs from when the light went out until they jumped, and the percentage of dogs that failed in each group to learn to jump and escape the jump. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 110%;">Maier and Seligman came to the conclusion that the only difference between the no-escape and escape groups was the ability to end the shock; the control factor. Therefore, the escape group learned to jump to not get shocked but the no-escape group didn’t see a reason to jump; this is what they thought would happened which was that the dogs in the no-escape group learned to be helpless. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 110%;">Seligman later said that in humans the development of depression involves something similar to learned helplessness which leads to depression. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 110%;">Because of Seligman’s findings, we understand that people are more likely to become depressed if they don’t put forth control. These effects can be permanent rather than temporary, and can be influential throughout many aspects of an individual’s life (Hock, 2005).
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 110%;">In a study by Horne & Picard, (1979) researchers found that an increased risk of cancer can be caused by a loss of a loved one, or loss of prestige.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 110%;">A health psychologist (Taylor, 1979) says that being a “good hospital patient” and not asking question is a form of learned helplessness where the patient doesn't put forth control of the situation.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 110%;">Another study regarding learned helplessness was by Ramey and <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">Finkelstein (1978). They did a study with babies and rotating mobiles. One group had pressure-sensitive pillows and when the babies moved their heads they controlled the rotation of the mobile. The other group of infants’ mobiles rotated at random. After 10 days the babies without the pressure-sensitive pillows couldn’t learn how to control the rotation of the mobiles. The first study taught them that their behavior had no impact on the rotation of the mobile and that knowledge transferred to the new study. The babies had learned to be helpless.

<span style="color: #ff0000; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 110%;">__Crowding into the Behavioral Sink__

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 110%;">Psychologists have always been interested in the effects of crowding on an individual’s behavior; the earliest research on this was by **John B. Calhoun** in 1962. Since, it wouldn’t be ethically right to do this to humans he did his experiment on white rats. Calhoun let groups of rats reproduce until they got to twice the number normally found in a specific space; in this case the space was 10-by14- foot room divided into four sections and he observed the rats’ behavior for 16 months. There were three studies that Calhoun did on these rats; there were groups of 32 or 56 rats. Within the four sections there were tunnels allowing the rats go throughout all four sections; section 1 connects to 2, 3 connects to 3, and 3 connects to 4. Therefore, if a rat was in section one and wanted to go to section 4 the rat would have to go through sections 1, 2, 3 and then 4. Calhoun also put an electrical shock on the top of each of these sections so the rats couldn’t climb over. The results of this was shocking, the higher the population got the more the male rats began to fight each other for social status, the two end sections section 1 and 4 had one male in charge so to say. Also, only about half of all the infants born in this experiment survived to adulthood. The rest of the 60 or so rats that were left in sections two and three and he experienced different behaviors than in sections 1 and 4 <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 110%;">The mother rats also lost their maternal ability to move their young from place to place, they would move some of their babies and forget to get the rest or just decide to leave them. They would eventually die and be eaten by the adult rats; the infant death rate in the middle two sections was 80 to 96 percent. The female expressed high complications at birth and by the end of the study about half of them died. The significance to these findings was that it got people thinking about the effects of humans and highly populated areas. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 110%;">A study by McCain, Cox, & Paulus (1984) found that prisoners in overcrowded prisons had a higher chance of suicides, homicides, disciplinary problems, and illnesses. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 110%;">Another study was researched involving the ability of people to problem-solve in different densities. People in crowded areas performed a lot worse than people in a large room with room to think and their own personal space. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 110%;">Finally, the more crowded people are the higher their blood pressure, and the higher their heart rate is, all in all higher-density areas cause more stress on individuals (Hock, 2005).
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 110%;">Aggression
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 110%;">Submissiveness
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 110%;">Sexual Deviance
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 110%;">Reproductive abnormalities

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 110%;">**Emil Kraepelin** was the first to classify mental disorders and he did so based on the cause, extent to which the brain and nervous system were involved, symptoms, and treatment. While his classification was used until the publication of the DSM his work is currently viewed as inhibiting therapeutic progress. While he categorized mental illness, people do not always fit exactly into those categories and disorders are not always physical as he believed. He also proposed that because they were caused by constitutional factors, mental illnesses were incurable. Kraepelin was the first to discover schizophrenia, manic depression, and co-discovered Alzheimer's Disease. Alois Alzheimer was a neurologist who noticed that people of a certain age often experienced a general loss of memory, reasoning ability, and comprehension. He was also the first person to study the effects of drugs on cognitive and behavioral functions, thus pioneering Psychopharmacology. He studied the effects of alcohol, morphine, caffeine and other drugs on various intellectual and behavioral tasks. The intellectual tasks included comprehension, association, and memory, while the behavioral tasks were things such as writing and speech. According to the Encyclopedia of Psychology, "Kraepelin was the first to use the methods of psychological investigation and experimentation in psychiatry...he ought to be recognized as the founder of Clinical Psychology" (Eysneck, Meili, & Arnold, 1972).