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Abnormal Psych

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Abnormal Psychology by Saul McLeod twitter icon published 2008, updated 2014

Abnormal psychology is a division of psychology that studies people who are "abnormal" or "atypical" compared to the members of a given society.

There is evidence that some psychological disorders are more common than was previously thought.

Depending on how data are gathered and how diagnoses are made, as many as 27% of some population groups may be suffering from depression at any one time (NIMH, 2001; data for older adults).

There are many ways that abnormality can be defined. For example:

Statistical Infrequency
Under this definition of abnormality, a person's trait, thinking or behavior is classified as abnormal if it is rare or statistically unusual. With this definition it is necessary to be clear about how rare a trait or behavior needs to be before we class it as abnormal

IQ graph

For instance one may say that an individual who has an IQ below or above the average level of IQ in society is abnormal.

However this definition obviously has limitations, it fails to recognize the desirability of the particular behavior.

Going back to the example, someone who has an IQ level above the normal average wouldn't necessarily be seen as abnormal, rather on the contrary they would be highly regarded for their intelligence.

This definition also implies that the presence of abnormal behavior in people should be rare or statistically unusual, which is not the case. Instead, any specific abnormal behavior may be unusual, but it is not unusual for people to exhibit some form of prolonged abnormal behavior at some point in their lives.

Limitation: However, this definition fails to distinguish between desirable and undesirable behavior. Statistically speaking, many very gifted individuals could be classified as ‘abnormal’ using this definition. The use of the

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