Criteria of Psychopathology The Webster’s English Dictionary defined Psychopathology as the scientific study of psychological disorders. Psychological disorders, most common to people’s awareness as abnormal behavior is defined by Barlow and Durand (2015), as a psychological dysfunction within an individual that is associated with distress or impairment in functioning and a response that is not atypical or culturally expected; psychological dysfunction basically refers to a breakdown in an individual’s cognitive, emotional and/or behavioral functioning (Stein et. al, 2010). It was observed over time that researchers, clinicians and mental health professionals have put forth their efforts to define and give array of answers as to what makes …show more content…
No matter what behavior is identified to be a dysfunction, it must be noteworthy to interfere in the individual’s life. Behaviors why may upset, distracts or confuses an individual that he / she cannot attend to own needs may define the dysfunction criterion. Distress is the second D of Abnormality which is related to dysfunction. It is related in a way that it becomes an important way to rate perceptual dysfunctions in an individual. Apparently, the relationship between distress and dysfunction is not always linear. An individual may experience a great deal of dysfunction and a very little distress or vice versa. This criterion refers to the individual’s subjective feelings of pain, anxiety, depression, agitation, disturbance in sleep or loss of …show more content…
This progress in defining abnormal behavior greatly contributed to the development of the DSM system (Simonsen, 2010). This was also the era in which diagnostic categories has only one purpose – the collection of statistical and census data. It was not until the mid – 1900s that the Americans developed their own early diagnostic system in an effort to smoothen the progress of diagnosing and treating soldiers returning from the war. Although this military categorization system was quite different from the most recent editions of DSM, it paved way on the establishment of the first edition of the DSM (Ginsburg,