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Abnormal Psychology

Abnormal Psychology

In asking the question of what abnormal psychology even is, we must quickly consider the very definition of our term ¡§abnormal¡¨.   By all rights, ¡§abnormal¡¨ is an exceptionally confusing word dependent on what is called ¡§normality¡¨.   Both terms may understandably change radically from one era to another and one culture to another. How then do we decide upon what is normal and what is abnormal? Indeed, this is much more of a philosophical problem than a psychological one.   For understandable reasons of practicability, it is necessary to create a roughly uniform definition of abnormal psychology that we can more or less agree upon as a group of caregivers. This general definition would naturally be general in its nature, but the common definition of the discipline of abnormal psychology often looks something like this:
Abnormal psychology is the study of behavior patterns that
diverge widely from generally accepted norms, especially those of a
pathological nature.
(¡§Abnormal Psychology¡¨)
Nonetheless, we can see that we are immediately at the risk of falling into tautology here. Although this definition does offer us a practical course and gives an insight into the subject of study that falls under the rubric of abnormal psychology, it does absolutely nothing to illuminate the concept of what abnormal is or how one might define abnormality in either a socially or pathologically significant sense. Indeed, part of the reason for this is that there is a variety of means of approaching a way of deciding what is to be construed as ¡§abnormal¡¨.   The decision of which methodology to use can have a considerable impact on the effective sorts of behaviors that one is to consider effectively ¡§abnormal.¡¨
One simple way of parsing the difference between abnormality and normality is to use a simply statistical set of criteria. In such an instance, one simply maps out the frequency of such a behavior among the population and plots it on a...