Psychopathology
...suggest severe mental disorder: hallucinations, delusions, and extreme affective disturbances. Hallucinations are false sensory experiences, such as hearing nonexistent voices. Delusions are extreme disorders of thinking that involve persistent false beliefs. If you think you are the President of the United States (and you are not), you have a symptom of psychopathology. Similarly, those whose affect (emotion) is, for no apparent reason, depressed, anxious, or manic–or those who seems to have no emotional response at all–have yet other signs of mental disorder. Beyond such signs of distress, the experts do not always agree, however. What is abnormal and what is not becomes a judgment call, a judgment made more difficult because no sharp boundary separates normal from abnormal thought and behavior. The medical model takes a "disease" view, while psychology sees mental disorder as an interaction of biological, cognitive, social, and other environmental factors.
Evolving Concepts of Mental Disorder
In the ancient world, people assumed that supernatural powers were everywhere, accounting for good fortune, disease, and disaster–even for the rise and fall of nations. In about 400 BC, the Greek physician Hippocrates may have taken humanity’s first step toward a scientific view of mental disturbance when he declared that abnormal behavior has physical causes. He taught his disciples to interpret the symptoms of psychopathology as an imbalance among four body fluids called "humors": blood, phlegm (mucus), black bile, and yellow bile. Those with an excess of black bile, for example, were inclined to melancholy or depression, while those who had an abundance of blood were sanguine, or warmhearted. With this revolutionary idea, Hippocrates incorporated mental disorder into medicine, and his view influenced educated people in the Western world until the end of the Roman...
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