Issues in Mental Health | OCR A-Level Psychology (H567)

Issues in Mental Health

189 questions
15 subtopics
Component 03: Applied psychology
Component 03

Issues in Mental Health is examined on component 03 of OCR Psychology, Applied psychology.

189 recall questions across 15 subtopics.

Sample questions from Issues in Mental Health

Answer each one closed book first, then open the answer.

Historical views of mental illness

Why is humoural theory regarded as an ancestor of the modern medical model?

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Because it treated madness as a physical disturbance of the body that could be corrected by physical means, which is the same reasoning the medical model uses today.
Defining abnormality and categorising mental disorders

Give two benefits of having an agreed classification system.

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It gives clinicians a shared language so that a diagnosis means the same thing to everyone, and it links each category to the treatments and research findings that apply to it.
Rosenhan (1973) on being sane in insane places: results, conclusions and evaluation

What was the outcome of the follow-up study?

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Of 193 genuine patients, 41 were confidently judged to be pseudopatients by at least one member of staff, even though Rosenhan had sent nobody at all.
Characteristics of affective, psychotic and anxiety disorders

What are avolition and alogia?

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Avolition is a severe loss of motivation to begin or sustain purposeful activity, and alogia is a marked poverty of speech.
Genetic and brain abnormality explanations of mental illness

Explain the diathesis-stress model.

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It proposes that a person inherits a predisposition to a disorder which develops into illness only when a sufficient environmental stressor triggers it.
Gottesman et al. (2010) offspring of psychiatrically ill parents: method and risk figures

How was a parent counted as having a disorder?

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A parent counted as affected only if they had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital with a recorded diagnosis of schizophrenia or of bipolar disorder.
Biological treatments: antipsychotics, SSRIs and ECT

What are extrapyramidal side effects?

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They are movement disturbances caused by dopamine blockade outside the target pathway, including tremor, muscle stiffness and restlessness.
Behaviourist and cognitive explanations of mental illness

Give two examples of the irrational beliefs Ellis described.

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The absolute demand that one must always succeed and be approved of, and catastrophising, in which an ordinary setback is treated as a disaster.

The 15 subtopics

One subtopic is one session. Work down the list.

Subtopic	What it covers	Questions
Historical views of mental illness	Recall questions on historical views of mental illness from trephination and Hippocrates' humours to medieval explanations, early asylums such as Bethlem, moral treatment, Kraepelin, chlorpromazine and deinstitutionalisation.	10
Defining abnormality and categorising mental disorders	Recall questions on statistical infrequency, deviation from social norms, failure to function adequately and deviation from ideal mental health as definitions of abnormality, and categorising disorders with classification systems, reliability, validity, comorbidity and cultural bias.	13
Rosenhan (1973) on being sane in insane places: background and procedure	Recall questions on the aim of Rosenhan's 1973 study On being sane in insane places, the pseudopatients and hospitals, the symptom reported on admission, behaviour on the ward, diagnoses, discharge, length of stay and who suspected them.	11
Rosenhan (1973) on being sane in insane places: results, conclusions and evaluation	Recall questions on Rosenhan's findings on reinterpreted behaviour, depersonalisation and staff responses, the follow-up study at a teaching hospital, conclusions about diagnostic labels and hospital environments, and the study's strengths, ethics, critics and relevance to categorising disorders.	13
Characteristics of affective, psychotic and anxiety disorders	Recall questions on the characteristics of affective disorders including major depression and bipolar disorder, psychotic disorders including the positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia, anxiety disorders including specific phobias, and identifying disorders from case descriptions.	18
The biochemical explanation of mental illness	Recall questions on the medical model's central assumption, the biochemical explanation, the original and revised dopamine hypotheses and their evidence, the monoamine hypothesis, cortisol in depression, the delay in antidepressant action, and the treatment aetiology fallacy.	9
Genetic and brain abnormality explanations of mental illness	Recall questions on the genetic explanation of mental illness, twin, adoption and family studies, concordance rates, diathesis-stress, polygenic disorders, brain abnormality explanations of schizophrenia and OCD, and strengths and criticisms of the medical model.	13
Gottesman et al. (2010) offspring of psychiatrically ill parents: method and risk figures	Recall questions on the aim of Gottesman et al.'s 2010 study of offspring of psychiatrically ill parents, the Danish registers, design and sample, how parental disorder was counted, and the risks of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder for children with two, one or no affected parents.	9
Gottesman et al. (2010) offspring of psychiatrically ill parents: conclusions and evaluation	Recall questions on Gottesman et al.'s findings on any psychiatric diagnosis and overlapping risk, their main conclusion and diathesis-stress, and the evaluation of strengths, underestimated risk, forty years of records, genes versus environment, social sensitivity and the medical model.	10
Biological treatments: antipsychotics, SSRIs and ECT	Recall questions on biological treatments including typical and atypical antipsychotics for schizophrenia, clozapine, extrapyramidal side effects and tardive dyskinesia, relapse, negative symptoms, adherence, evaluation of drug treatment, SSRIs for depression, and electroconvulsive therapy.	18
Behaviourist and cognitive explanations of mental illness	Recall questions on the behaviourist explanation of mental illness including classical and operant conditioning, Little Albert, Mowrer's two-process model and social learning, and the cognitive explanation including Ellis's ABC model, irrational beliefs, Beck's negative triad, schemas and cognitive biases.	14
Humanistic, psychodynamic and cognitive neuroscience explanations of mental illness	Recall questions on the humanistic explanation including Rogers's incongruence and conditions of worth, the psychodynamic explanation including personality conflict, defence mechanisms and Freud on depression, and the cognitive neuroscience explanation of hallucinations and depressive bias.	14
Szasz (2011) the myth of mental illness: mental illness as a metaphor	Recall questions on the nature and purpose of Szasz's 2011 article The myth of mental illness: 50 years later, how genuine diseases and mental disorders are identified, mental illness as a metaphor, problems in living, and the practices he wants abolished.	8
Szasz (2011) the myth of mental illness: objections to coercive psychiatry and evaluation	Recall questions on Szasz's objections to involuntary hospitalisation and the insanity defence, the psychiatry he accepts, whose interests mental illness serves, expanding diagnostic manuals, his conclusion, and the strengths, weaknesses, biological evidence against and harms of his position.	11
Non-biological treatments: CBT, REBT and systematic desensitisation	Recall questions on cognitive behavioural therapy for depression including thought diaries, Socratic questioning, behavioural activation and homework, Ellis's rational emotive behaviour therapy, comparisons with antidepressants, and systematic desensitisation, exposure and flooding for phobias.	18

Issues in Mental Health is 189 of the 3,537 questions in the guide.Get the guide, £8

How the guide is worked

Answering a question from memory stores it far better than reading the answer again. The guide runs that as a fixed procedure on one subtopic at a time, about twenty minutes a session.

Step 1 · Closed book
Cover the answers. Work through one subtopic and write down what you can. Leave blanks where you have nothing.
Step 2 · Open book
Go back to the top. Read each printed answer and write it out in full, including the ones you had right.
Step 3 · Closed book again
Same questions, same order, from memory. The gap between pass one and pass three is the session result.

Read the full method, the return schedule and the research behind it.