Blog Post #12

According to the book, ongoing patterns of thoughts, feelings, and actions that are deviant, distressful, and/or dysfunctional are considered psychological disorders. If some acts “abnormally” they don’t necessarily have a psychological disorder. Unless their abnormal behavior is harmfully dysfunctional, distressing, or deviant, their behavior is probably acceptable. A lot of people behave abnormally from time to time and it has nothing to do with a psychological disorder.
I think I may have an undiagnosed obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). I can’t eat Skittles unless I can eat them in true rainbow order: red, orange, yellow, green, and violet (purple). I have no logical explanation for why I do this, I just do. It really bothers me if I can eat all of the red Skittles before I eat the green Skittles. A person with a real, diagnosed OCD would experience obsessive thoughts followed by compulsive behaviors. An OCD is an anxiety disorder. Someone with an OCD may constantly think that they left the oven on, but rather than checking just once they will check ten or eleven times. The obsessive thought/worry is leaving the oven on and the behavior is checking to be sure frequently. I think if I had a real obsessive-compulsive disorder, life would be pretty difficult. Having to deal with constant anxiety and distress would make each day hard. Always obsessing over little things and acting weirdly and compulsively would be horrible! It would be impossible to live a “normal” life.
In this section, I thought it was interesting to learn how many people suffer from schizophrenia. I never knew that 1 out of every 100 people suffers from schizophrenia – it’s much more common than I ever realized. I also learned a lot more about the different types of schizophrenia. Some are more severe than others and that schizophrenia can also be genetically inherited.