fundamentals of abnormal psychology

Introduction
Psychological disturbance will certainly touch us, to some extent, at a certain point in our lives. Just as medical students may develop the notion that they may have the physical diseases that they have just learned to diagnose, students in abnormal psychology might see in themselves the symptoms of abnormal behavior. There may be two reasons behind such thinking. First, as you study the causes of mental disorders, you will probably find at least some of them in your own family background. Most people, when asked to search their past for experiences that could have led to some form of a psychological collapse, would perhaps not find it difficult to do. Second, you yourself have probably experienced to some degree a number of these symptoms that you will be reading about, just as everybody or most of us have. Hardly do we encounter an individual who has never become anxious or depressed, not felt physically ill or irritated when experiencing conflict, or not become so frustrated and angry when the whole world seems to be against him. While all of us may have had the same experiences and symptoms as do persons diagnosed to be abnormal, most of us have been able to go through life’s challenges without suffering from an actual breakdown in our psychological functions. The enormous task of identifying that breaking point will definitely be difficult, if not virtually impossible, but is certainly one of the most challenging tasks in the whole realm of the field of psychology.
Defining abnormal behavior There are two different ways to approach the problem of definition : deviation from the average or normal, and the deviation from the optimal. The statistical average gives one framework for thinking about normality. The average is the arithmetical mean on a given measure, arrived at by dividing the sum of all the scores by the number of people whose characteristics are measured in a distribution. One deals with his averages all his life : height,