Lesson 3: Neurosis
Lesson Review
This lesson gave you the opportunity to study some of the unusual neurotic behaviours people develop when plagued by guilt, anxiety, and stress. Neurosis interferes with a person’s everyday functioning, but it is usually not serious enough to destroy completely the person’s sense of self and ability to cope with life. Neurosis takes many shapes and forms.
|
To summarize: • Each culture’s definition of normal behaviour is different. • Being normal means adjusting to the demands and expectations of one’s own culture whatever they are. • Mentally challenged people are those whose mental development has been hindered by birth defects or injuries of some kind. • Mental illness refers to problems with one’s perceptions of life and one’s behaviour patterns. • Although we may be tempted to diagnose someone else’s behaviour and attach a label to it, we must remember that labels can impose very negative value judgements. • One of the obvious characteristics of people with neurosis is the excessive anxiety they feel. • Free-floating anxiety means that the person has a general feeling of worry or uneasiness that is not connected to any specific object, event, or situation. • Bound anxiety is linked to a specific cause—an object, event, or situation. • Neurotic individuals feel irritable, tense, and dissatisfied with life. • Amnesia is the forgetting of important memories through repression and dissociation or disconnecting key links between activities and behaviour. • Sleep disturbances are another type of dissociation; sometimes sleepwalking disorders can be violent. • Conversion hysteria occurs when strong, repressed emotions disturb the smooth functioning of some organ. • The hypochondriac continually worries about many body ailments just for the sake of getting sympathy and attention. • Chronic Fatigue Syndrome prevents people from performing everyday functions when they are overcome by such symptoms as an overwhelming sense of fatigue, headaches, muscle pain, fever, and depression. • Obsessive behaviours are persistent thoughts that grip the mind. • Compulsive behaviours are repetitive, ritualistic actions. • Obsessive-compulsive behaviours are a combination of rigid ideas and controlling behaviours. • Anorexia nervosa is an eating disorder wherein the young person stops eating until he or she become thin almost to the point of starvation. • Bulimia is an eating disorder characterized by periods of binge (nonstop) eating and then purging to get rid of the food that has been consumed. • Phobias are types of intense, panic fear reactions; a person will go to any lengths to avoid the specific object or event that creates a phobia. • Desensitization is a method of treating fears or phobias by having a person gradually confront the object that is feared using small steps with more and more frightening situations. • Flooding is a method of treating fears or phobias by immediately confronting the feared object from the beginning. • Depression is a serious physical/emotional state that causes a person to be unable to function when fulfilling everyday duties. • A depressed person will display some of the following characteristics: feelings of worthlessness and sadness, problems with sleeping, restlessness, fatigue, digestive problems, body pains, and inability to concentrate on tasks. • Brainwashing means forcibly controlling a person’s mind by destroying personality and beliefs and then programming new ideas. |