Mental Health Awareness Month: Mental Health

Disease characterized by impaired control over the consumption of alcoholic beverages.

Lack of desire to eat, or refusal to eat, especially the pathological condition of anorexia nervosa, most often found in adolescent girls and young women.

Anxiety is a reaction to a perceived threat, as is fear. Unlike fear, however, which is a reaction to a specific stimulus or event, anxiety is often more diffuse or of uncertain origin. In general, compared to fear, which occurs immediately after an event has transpired, anxiety is centered on a possible experience in the future.

Any of several psychological disorders of mood characterized usually by alternating episodes of depression and mania — called also manic depression, manic-depressive illness.

Disorder best defined as a collection of psychological symptoms including sadness; unhappy thoughts characterized by worry, poor self-image, self-blame, guilt and low self-confidence; downbeat views on the future; and a feeling of hopelessness.

Dissociative identity disorder (DID) has been one of the most controversial diagnostic categories in the history of psychiatry.

The term ‘eating disorders’ covers obesity, feeding problems in childhood, anorexia nervosa, and bulimia nervosa.

The term mental illness refers to severe emotional or thought disturbance that negatively affects one’s health and safety.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder is a chronic, disabling anxiety disorder characterized by intrusive, persistent thoughts and repetitive behaviors.

(PTSD), mental disorder that follows an occurrence of extreme psychological stress, such as that encountered in war or resulting from violence, childhood abuse, sexual abuse, or serious accident.

In psychiatry, a broad category of mental disorder encompassing the most serious emotional disturbances, often rendering the individual incapable of staying in contact with reality.

Group of severe mental disorders characterized by reality distortions resulting in unusual thought patterns and behaviors.

Self-destruction as an intentional act.

From Encyclopedia of Special Education
The purpose of the Child Behavior Checklist is to quickly collect standardized ratings on a broad spectrum of competencies and problems for children aged 6 to 18 years.

From The Concise Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychology and Behavioral Science
The Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II; Beck, Steer, & Brown, 1996) is a 21-item self-report instrument for measuring the severity of depression in adolescents and adults according to symptoms corresponding to the criteria for diagnosing major depressive disorders.

From Encyclopedia of Special Education
The Burks’ Behavior Rating Scales (BBRS), Preschool and Kindergarten Form and Grades One–Nine Form, are rating inventories used to identify the type and severity of problem behaviors exhibited by referred children ages 2 to 15.

Test that attempts to measure innate intellectual ability, rather than acquired ability.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a widely used personality inventory (test) employed in vocational, educational, and psychotherapy settings. MBTI is used to evaluate personality type in adolescents and adults age 14 and older.

Any of a variety of testing procedures for measuring psychological traits and behavior, or for studying some specialized aspect of ability.

From The Concise Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychology and Behavioral Science
The field of psychometrics generally considers quantitative psychological data. Such data normally emerges from test responses, although it may come from other measures.

From The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology
The grandfather of all projective tests, designed and developed by the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach. The administration of the test consists of a structured interview using a series of ten standardized, bilaterally symmetrical inkblots.

Abnormal psychology is the area of psychological investigation concerned with understanding the nature of individual pathologies of the mind, mood, and behavior.

Efforts to categorize and describe “madness” date back to ancient Greece; however, interest in psychiatric categorization has intensified since the turn of the twentieth century.

Any of a variety of testing procedures for measuring psychological traits and behavior, or for studying some specialized aspect of ability. Several forms of testing have arisen from the need to understand personality and its relationship to psychological disorders.

Science or study of the thought processes and behavior of humans and other animals in their interaction with the environment.

Stress is most commonly thought of as psychological tension (“I feel stressed”); this description is partly accurate.

This entry reviews the definition and history of psychological trauma, some possible effects of psychological trauma (including posttraumatic stress disorder [PTSD] and resilience), treatment, and types of psychological trauma, including collective trauma, national trauma, intergenerational trauma, and international trauma.

Any of a wide range of drugs used to treat psychic depression. They are given to elevate mood, counter suicidal thoughts, and increase the effectiveness of psychotherapy.

“‘ I could draw it,’ a dreamer often says to us, ‘but I don’t know how to say it.’” So said Sigmund Freud (1963, p. 90). Considering that Freud regarded dreams to be “the royal road to the unconscious,” it is surprising that he did not ask his patients to do so.

CBT is an extremely successful and popular method of psychotherapy, loosely based on cognitive principles.

In an early attempt to define counseling, the Society of Counseling Psychology, which is Division 17 of the American Psychological Association, described counseling as a process of “helping individuals toward overcoming obstacles to personal growth, wherever these may be encountered, and toward achieving optimum development of personal resources”

A crisis is a collapse in one’s ability to solve problems or cope with a situation in which the person’s existing strategies for coping do not work.

Any of a range of substances, natural or synthetic, administered to humans and animals as therapeutic agents: to diagnose, prevent, or treat disease, or to assist recovery from injury.

Efforts to categorize and describe “madness” date back to ancient Greece; however, interest in psychiatric categorization has intensified since the turn of the twentieth century.

In psychiatry, treatment of mood disorders by means of electricity; the broader term is "shock therapy.

From The Concise Corsini encyclopedia of psychology and behavioral science
Gestalt therapy is an existential and phenomenological approach, emphasizing the principles of present-centered awareness and immediate experience.

A means of changing behavior and emotional patterns, based on the premise that much of human behavior and feeling involves the individual's adaptation and response to other people.

[Gr.,=putting to sleep], to induce an altered state of consciousness characterized by deep relaxation and heightened suggestibility.

Problems in marriage and other close relationships are widespread. For example, the divorce rate in the United States is approximately 50%. Relationship problems are also among the most common reasons for people seeking mental health services.

Music affects people emotionally, physically, and aesthetically, and these responses provide the basis for the use of music in therapy.

Pharmacology is the science and practice of developing and administering chemicals as agents in the treatment of diseases.

Name given by Sigmund Freud to a system of interpretation and therapeutic treatment of psychological disorders.

Any of a variety of testing procedures for measuring psychological traits and behavior, or for studying some specialized aspect of ability.

In its broadest sense, the study of all pharmacological agents that affect mental and emotional functions.

Treatment of mental and emotional disorders using psychological methods. Psychotherapy, thus, does not include physiological interventions.

Whether one is talking about the latest actor, politician, or average person, the term rehabilitation is likely to pop up in casual conversation.