A mental disorder is an impairment of the mind disrupting normal thinking, feeling, mood, behavior, or social interactions, and accompanied by significant distress or dysfunction. The causes of mental disorders are very complex and vary depending on the particular disorder and the individual. Although the causes of most mental disorders are not fully understood, researchers have identified a variety of biological, psychological, and environmental factors that can contribute to the development or progression of mental disorders. Most mental disorders result in a combination of several different factors rather than just a single factor.
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a mental and behavioral disorder that develops from experiencing a traumatic event, such as sexual assault, warfare, traffic collisions, child abuse, domestic violence, or other threats on a person's life or well-being. Symptoms may include disturbing thoughts, feelings, or dreams related to the events, mental or physical distress to trauma-related cues, attempts to avoid trauma-related cues, alterations in the way a person thinks and feels, and an increase in the fight-or-flight response. These symptoms last for more than a month after the event and can include triggers such as misophonia. Young children are less likely to show distress, but instead may express their memories through play. A person with PTSD is at a higher risk of suicide and intentional self-harm.
Psychological trauma is an emotional response caused by severe distressing events, such as bodily injury, sexual violence, or other threats to the life of the subject or their loved ones; indirect exposure, such as from watching television news, may be extremely distressing and can produce an involuntary and possibly overwhelming physiological stress response, but does not always produce trauma per se. Examples of distressing events include violence, rape, or a terrorist attack.
Sex is correlated with the prevalence of certain mental disorders, including depression, anxiety and somatic complaints. For example, women are more likely to be diagnosed with major depression, while men are more likely to be diagnosed with substance abuse and antisocial personality disorder. There are no marked gender differences in the diagnosis rates of disorders like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Men are at risk to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) due to past violent experiences such as accidents, wars and witnessing death, and women are diagnosed with PTSD at higher rates due to experiences with sexual assault, rape and child sexual abuse. Nonbinary or genderqueer identification describes people who do not identify as either male or female. People who identify as nonbinary or gender queer show increased risk for depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. People who identify as transgender demonstrate increased risk for depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Psychiatric epidemiology is a field which studies the causes (etiology) of mental disorders in society, as well as conceptualization and prevalence of mental illness. It is a subfield of the more general epidemiology. It has roots in sociological studies of the early 20th century. However, while sociological exposures are still widely studied in psychiatric epidemiology, the field has since expanded to the study of a wide area of environmental risk factors, such as major life events, as well as genetic exposures. Increasingly neuroscientific techniques like MRI are used to explore the mechanisms behind how exposures to risk factors may impact psychological problems and explore the neuroanatomical substrate underlying psychiatric disorders.
Dan Joseph Stein is a South African psychiatrist who is a professor and Chair of the Dept of Psychiatry and Mental Health at the University of Cape Town, and Director of the South African MRC Unit on Risk & Resilience in Mental Disorders. Stein was the Director of UCT's early Brain and Behaviour Initiative, and was the inaugural Scientific Director of UCT's later Neuroscience Institute. He has also been a visiting professor at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in the United States, and at Aarhus University in Denmark.
Childhood trauma is often described as serious adverse childhood experiences. Children may go through a range of experiences that classify as psychological trauma; these might include neglect, abandonment, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, and physical abuse. They may also witness abuse of a sibling or parent, or have a mentally ill parent. These events can have profound psychological, physiological, and sociological impacts leading to lasting negative effects on health and well-being. These events may include antisocial behaviors, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and sleep disturbances. Additionally, children whose mothers have experienced traumatic or stressful events during pregnancy have an increased risk of mental health disorders and other neurodevelopmental disorders.
Occupational health psychology (OHP) is an interdisciplinary area of psychology that is concerned with the health and safety of workers. OHP addresses a number of major topic areas including the impact of occupational stressors on physical and mental health, the impact of involuntary unemployment on physical and mental health, work-family balance, workplace violence and other forms of mistreatment, psychosocial workplace factors that affect accident risk and safety, and interventions designed to improve and/or protect worker health. Although OHP emerged from two distinct disciplines within applied psychology, namely, health psychology and industrial and organizational psychology, for a long time the psychology establishment, including leaders of industrial/organizational psychology, rarely dealt with occupational stress and employee health, creating a need for the emergence of OHP. OHP has also been informed by other disciplines, including occupational medicine, sociology, industrial engineering, and economics, as well as preventive medicine and public health. OHP is thus concerned with the relationship of psychosocial workplace factors to the development, maintenance, and promotion of workers' health and that of their families. The World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization estimate that exposure to long working hours causes an estimated 745,000 workers to die from ischemic heart disease and stroke in 2016, mediated by occupational stress.
A depression rating scale is a psychometric instrument (tool), usually a questionnaire whose wording has been validated with experimental evidence, having descriptive words and phrases that indicate the severity of depression for a time period. When used, an observer may make judgements and rate a person at a specified scale level with respect to identified characteristics. Rather than being used to diagnose depression, a depression rating scale may be used to assign a score to a person's behaviour where that score may be used to determine whether that person should be evaluated more thoroughly for a depressive disorder diagnosis. Several rating scales are used for this purpose.
The Millennium Cohort Study is an ongoing longitudinal cohort study headquartered at the Naval Health Research Center in San Diego, California and designed to evaluate any long-term health effects of military service, including deployments. It is the largest population-based prospective health project in US military history, currently collecting data on over 200,000 enrolled participants. Investigators that conduct the Millennium Cohort Study include uniformed and non-uniformed scientists from the Army, Navy, Air Force, Department of Veterans Affairs and academic institutions.
The epidemiology of depression has been studied across the world. Depression is a major cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide, as the epidemiology has shown. Lifetime prevalence estimates vary widely, from 3% in Japan to 17% in India. Epidemiological data shows higher rates of depression in the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia and the United States than in other regions and countries. For most countries among the 10 studied, the number of people who experience depression during their lifetimes falls within an 8–12% range.
Psychological first aid (PFA) is a technique designed to reduce the occurrence of post-traumatic stress disorder. It was developed by the National Center for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (NC-PTSD), a section of the United States Department of Veterans Affairs, in 2006. It has been endorsed and used by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Community Emergency Response Team (CERT), the American Psychological Association (APA) and many others. It was developed in a two-day intensive collaboration, involving more than 25 disaster mental health researchers, an online survey of the first cohort that used PFA and repeated reviews of the draft.
Carolyn M. Mazure is an American psychologist and the Norma Weinberg Spungen and Joan Lebson Bildner Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at the Yale School of Medicine. She created and directs Women’s Health Research at Yale — Yale’s interdisciplinary research center on health and gender.
Haroutune Armenian, is a Lebanese born Armenian-American academic, physician, doctor of public health (1974), Professor, President of the American University of Armenia, President Emeritus, American University of Armenia. Professor in Residence, UCLA, Fielding School of Public Health.
David Vlahov is an American epidemiologist and professor emeritus at the UCSF School of Nursing, of which he previously served as dean from April 2011 to August 2016. He is also the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Urban Health, and has been a member of the National Academy of Medicine since 2011. He is known for researching issues related to social determinants of health, such as the effectiveness of needle exchange programs. With Sandro Galea, he has also researched psychological responses to the September 11 attacks among residents of New York City.
Jonathan S. Comer. is an American psychologist who is a Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at Florida International University. He is currently the director of an interdisciplinary clinical research program called the Mental health Interventions and Novel Therapeutics (MINT) Program. The MINT program focuses on improving the quality, scope, and accessibility of mental health care. Comer also serves as director of the Network for Enhancing Wellness in Disaster-Affected Youth, a SAMHSA-funded program in the National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN) that provides trauma-informed training and consultation to youth-serving professionals in disaster-prone and disaster-hit regions. Comer is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and a leader in the field of clinical child and adolescent psychology. The author of over 250 scientific papers and chapters, he has received early career awards from the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, and the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies for his work. His research has been funded by federal agencies and by several private foundations and non-profit organizations. He has also received funding from the Andrew Kukes Foundation for Social Anxiety.
Bruce Philip Dohrenwend is an American psychiatric epidemiologist who studies the effects of social adversity on mental health. He is Professor Emeritus of Social Science in Columbia University's Department of Psychiatry and Professor of Epidemiology in the university's Mailman School of Public Health.
Katie A. McLaughlin is an American clinical psychologist and expert on how stress, trauma, and other adverse events, such as natural disorders or pandemics, affect behavioral and brain development during childhood and adolescence. McLaughlin is a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University.
Bonnie L. Green is a psychiatrist known for her research of trauma-related mental health needs of female primary care patients from lower-income households. She served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Traumatic Stress from 1993 until 1997. She was president of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies from 2000 to 2001.
Richard F. Mollica is an American academic and writer. He is the Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma at Massachusetts General Hospital. His research focuses on Psychological trauma and recovery. Mollica has published over 160 scientific manuscripts, and has published Healing Invisible Wounds (2006) and Manifesto IV Healing a Violent World (2018). In 2022, he received the lifetime award from Harvard Medical School, and in 2023, the Lux et Veritas Award from Yale Divinity School
