Psychopathology
How should we understand, explain, and classify psychological problems?
Psychological problems raise questions about distress, disability, difference, and the conditions in which people live. Psychopathology connects those questions with evidence about development, biological processes, learning, relationships, and the course of difficulties over time. Begin by examining what counts as a mental disorder, then consider how competing explanations can be tested. Across these questions, ask where diagnostic boundaries help and where they conceal important differences.
Start here
What Is a Mental Disorder?
The conceptual and scientific problems of defining, classifying, and understanding mental disorder.
Introductory · 10 core readings · 5 units · No prerequisites
Begin the syllabus →Additional syllabi
How Should We Classify Psychopathology?
Examine how classifications are built and evaluated, with a dedicated HiTOP unit connecting its hierarchy to clinical use, predictive evidence and critical questions.
Intermediate · 11 readings
How Do Psychological Disorders Develop and Persist?
Distinguish prediction from cause, compare changing life histories, and evaluate explanations of persistence, adaptation, and recovery.
Introductory · 8 readings
How Should We Understand Neurodevelopmental Conditions?
Compare autism and ADHD to examine developmental variation, disability, heterogeneous processes, interaction, support needs, and outcomes across time.
Introductory · 9 readings
How Does Depression Arise and Recur?
Compare explanations of depression across symptoms, cognitive vulnerability, stressful circumstances, immune pathways, and evidence about improvement and recurrence.
Intermediate · 10 readings
What Explains Mood Episodes in Bipolar Disorder?
Compare explanations of bipolar mood episodes through conceptual reviews, prospective studies, lived experience, and an intervention trial.
Intermediate · 9 readings
When Do Fear and Worry Become Persistent Problems?
Compare explanations of persistent fear and worry through learning, bodily interpretation, social evaluation, uncertainty, and evidence about change.
Intermediate · 9 readings
Why Do Obsessions and Compulsions Persist?
Compare appraisal, checking, incompleteness, habit, and goal-directed accounts of OCD through conceptual arguments, experiments, clinical comparisons, and change over time.
Intermediate · 9 readings
Why Do Responses to Trauma Follow Different Paths?
Explain different courses after trauma by comparing trajectories, memory and appraisal, continuing social conditions, complex presentations, and tests of change.
Intermediate · 9 readings
How Do Psychotic Experiences Develop and Persist?
Distinguish experiences from diagnoses, compare cognitive and biological explanations, and examine social context, persistence and different meanings of recovery.
Intermediate · 10 readings
When Do Personality Patterns Become Disabling?
A reading path through the boundary between personality variation and disorder, competing measures, developmental and interpersonal explanations, and the difference between symptom change and everyday functioning.
Intermediate · 9 readings
How Does Substance Use Become Persistent Despite Harm?
A reading path through competing explanations of persistent harmful substance use, evidence from laboratory and real-world settings, and different meanings of recovery.
Intermediate · 11 readings
How Do Eating Disorders Develop and Persist?
Compare explanations of restrictive and binge-eating difficulties, distinguish vulnerabilities from consequences, and examine how definitions and follow-up shape what we know about recovery.
Intermediate · 10 readings
Why Are Suicidal Thoughts and Actions Difficult to Explain and Predict?
A research path through measurement, ideation-to-action theories, forecasting, short-term changes and prevention trials, with careful attention to outcomes, populations and uncertainty.
Intermediate · 9 readings