My favorite misconception (which students often aren't aware that they hold) is the belief that if a disorder has a clear environmental cause, then it isn't "really" a mental disorder. Strangely, they often also feel that if a disorder has a clear biological cause then it isn't really a mental disorder. What's left then?
Students also have a hard time with the concept that everything that is psychological is simultaneously biological (i.e., represented in the brain). They therefore assume that if a known cause of a disorder is environmental the treatment needs to be environmental, and that if a known cause is biological the treatment needs to be biological.
Students also tend to believe that there is a much higher violence rate among people with mentally illness than is the case, and that the insanity defense is often used in criminal trials (it isn't).
Students often confuse Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder with Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder (actually quite different).
Students often believe that most children with autism have savant abilities (most don't).
Steve
Beth Benoit wrote:
The four that come immediately to my mind are about schizophrenia.First, the confusion of "schizophrenia" with multiple personality disorder, or more appropriately, DID. (Students are often quick to argue that "schizophrenia" means "split brain" as though that proves it means MPD.) Students probably can't be blamed, since the media use the adjective "schizophrenic" so frequently to imply there are two ways of looking at things or that a person is duplicitous.
The second is the mispronunciation of "schizophrenia." (Maybe that will engender another TIPS discussion as did the earlier one of neuron "buttons/boutons.")
Third is the concept that people on the street/homeless are usually schizophrenic. This is always a good example of critical thinking, since once students factor in the possible effects of sleeplessness, fear, hunger, depression, substance abuse and the necessity for carrying all your belongings with you, they see the homeless in a different light. (Of course the rates of schiz. and other mental disorders are believed to be higher for the homeless, but the last I recall it was closer to 30%.)
And fourth is the assertion that schizophrenia can be "cured" with medication. This isn't surprising coming from a generation that was raised to believe there's a pill for everything.
Beth Benoit
University System of New Hampshire
on 7/21/01 1:21 PM, Jeff Ricker at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I was wondering if anyone had some examples of common student
misconceptions about the field of abnormal psychology. I would like to
address some of these misconceptions when I teach the course.Jeff
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