The History of Abnormal Psychology

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Wildcard Images/Glasshouse. Photo for illustrative purposes only; any individual depicted is a model.

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“Big Edie” (Edith Bouvier Beale, 1894–1977) and her daughter, “Little Edie” (Edith Beale, 1917–2002), lived together as adults for 29 years. Their home was a 28-room mansion, called Grey Gardens, in the chic town of East Hampton, New York. But the Beales were not rich society women, entertaining in grand style. They had few visitors, other than people who delivered food to them daily, and they lived in impoverished circumstances. For the most part, they inhabited only two of the second-floor rooms and an upstairs porch of a house that was falling apart. These intelligent women were not simply poor recluses, though. They were unconventional, eccentric women who flaunted the rules of their time and social class.

CHAPTER OUTLINE

The Three Criteria for Determining Psychological Disorders

Distress

Impairment in Daily Life

Risk of Harm

Context and Culture

Views of Psychological Disorders Before Science

Ancient Views of Psychopathology

Forces of Evil in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

Rationality and Reason in the 18th and 19th Centuries

The Transition to Scientific Accounts of Psychological Disorders

Freud and the Importance of Unconscious Forces

The Humanist Response

Scientific Accounts of Psychological Disorders

Behaviorism

The Cognitive Contribution

Social Forces

Biological Explanations

The Modern Synthesis of Explanations of Psychopathology

Let’s consider Big Edie first. In her later years, Big Edie had difficulty walking, and her bedroom was the hub of the Beale women’s lives and full of squalor. It contained a small refrigerator, a hot plate on which food was heated or cooked, and up to 52 cats. The room had two twin beds, one for Little Edie, the other for Big Edie. Big Edie made her bed into an unusual nest of blankets (no sheets). Cats constantly walked across the bed or rested on it; because the women didn’t provide the cats with a litter box, the bed was one of the spots the cats left their droppings. Big Edie’s mattress was so soiled that the grime and the cat droppings were indistinguishable.

Big Edie hadn’t left the house in decades (except for one occasion; Sheehy, 1972) and would let Little Edie out of her sight for only a few minutes before yelling for her to return to the bedroom. When Big Edie fell off a chair and broke her leg at the age of 80, she refused to leave the house to see a doctor, and refused to allow a doctor to come to the house to examine her leg. As a result, she developed bedsores that became infected and she died at Grey Gardens 7 months later (Wright, 2007).

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Little Edie was also unusual, most obviously in her style of dress. Little Edie always covered her head, usually with a sweater that she kept in place with a piece of jewelry. She professed not to like women in skirts, but invariably wore skirts herself, typically wearing them upside down so that the waistband was around her knees or calves and the skirt hem bunched around her waist. She advocated wearing stockings over pants, and she suggested that women “take off the skirt, and use it as a cape” (Maysles & Maysles, 1976).

Although both of these women were odd, could their behavior be chalked up to eccentricity or did one or both of them have a psychological disorder? It depends on how psychological disorder is defined.

Abnormal psychology The subfield of psychology that addresses the causes and progression of psychological disorders; also referred to as psychopathology.

The sort of psychologist who would evaluate Big Edie and Little Edie would specialize in abnormal psychology (or psychopathology), the subfield of psychology that addresses the causes and progression of psychological disorders (also referred to as psychiatric disorders, mental disorders, or mental illness). How would a mental health clinician—a mental health professional who evaluates or treats people with psychological disorders—determine whether Big Edie or Little Edie (or both of them) had a psychological disorder? The clinician would need to evaluate whether the women’s behavior and experience met three general criteria for psychological disorders.