question_answer

Explain the term dissociation. Discuss its various forms.

Or

Explain the diathesis-stress model of abnormal behaviour giving examples from daily life.

Answer:

Dissociation involves feelings of unreality, estrangement, depersonalization and sometimes a loss or shift of identity. It can be viewed as severance of the connections between ideas and emotions.

There is sudden temporary alterations of consciousness that blot out painful experiences are a defining characteristics of dissociation disorders.

Different forms of dissociation can occur in the form of following disorders:

Dissociative Amnesia: It is characterised by extensive but selective memory loss that has no known organic cause on biological damage (eg. head injury). Some people cannot remember anything about their past. Others can no longer recall specific events, people, places, or objects while their other memory for other events remain intact. This disorder is often associated with overwhelming stress.

Dissociative Fugue: The person unexpectedly travel away from home and work place, the assumption of a new identity and the inability to recall the previous identity. The fugue usually ends when the person suddenly ?wakes up? with no memory of the events that occurred during the fugue.

Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID): It is often referred to as multiple personality. It is associated with traumatic experiences in childhood. The person assumes alternate personalities that may or may not be aware of each other.

Depersonalization: It involves a dream like state in which the person has a sense of being separated both from self and from reality. There is a change of self- perception, and the person?s sense of reality is temporarily lost or changed.

Or

Diathesis-Stress Model of Abnormal Behaviour

This model states that psychological disorders develop when a diathesis (biological predisposition to the disorder) is set off by a stressful situation.

This model has three components:

(i) First is the diathesis or the presence of some biological aberration which may be inherited.

(ii) The second component is that the diathesis may carry a vulnerability to develop a psychological disorder. This means that the person is ?at risk? or ?predisposed? to develop the disorder.

(iii) The third component is the presence of pathogenic stressors, i.e., factors/stressors that may lead to psycho-pathology. If such ?at risk? persons are exposed to these stressors, their predisposition may actually evolve into a disorder.

This model can be applied to several disorders including anxiety, depression and schizophrenia. For example, schizophrenia may be triggered in someone whose diathesis, for example, is worsened by being raised in an isolated, unloving environment. In this case, stress may act at the level of hypothalamus and pituitary gland through the stress hormone cortisol to interact with the underlying vulnerability to tiger or worsen the individual?s schizophrenia.

According to the model, the greater a person?s inherent vulnerability for developing depression, the less environmental stress will be required to cause him/her to become depressed. Death or losses such as job, relationship difficulties like divorce, normal milestones such as puberty, marriage or retirement, alcoholism or drug abuse, neurochemical and hormonal imbalances, and infections can all be powerful enough to cause depressive symptoms in someone with a diathesis for this illness. However, each of these events will impact individual in a unique manner.