Insanity - What is it?

Insanity - what is it?

Basically, this is about Assignment 8.  What is madness?  More to the point, how can we define abnormal behaviour?  The assignment asks for you to choose three out of the five, describe/explain and evaluate them.  You know how to do this by now.  You see, the assignment appeared at the beginning of last year's course and the headings in task 2 are designed to help people evaluate.  So you can set the assignment out as a standard piece of writing - describe/evaluate one approach, describe evaluate second approach, describe evaluate third approach, finish off with perhaps a paragraph that brings it all together.

You can actually find all that you need to achieve a pass in the Class Notebook and the handout for DSM IV.  This mindmap is on the website  - in fact, look at the abnormal psychology page.    There's a fair bit of help there.  Gross is helpful.  Used the index to find things like classification systems.  About 750 - 1000 words if you feel you need a ball-park figure.  Remember that an opinion expressed in a text book is perfectly OK as a reference of supporting or contradicting evidence for an approach.

But you can in fact find much more outside the website.  For example, if you choose to discuss classification methods, then you should include discussion on Rosenhahn (1973) "On being sane in insane places".    

The picture is of Bedlam, a famous picture from Rakes Progress.  It is not a picture of room M41 on a bad day.

Meanwhile, here is a picture about as far from Bedlam as you can get.  You could try doing your assignment there, but I expect the laptop would fall through the hammock.