5. Stress-Related Disorders

About this Lecture

Lecture

In this lecture, we think about stress-related disorders, focusing in particular on: (i) defining the term ‘stress’, with reference to Selye’s General Adaption Syndrome (1946), as an external factor in relation to which human beings show specific psychological and physiological responses (e.g. the fight or flight response); (ii) acute stress disorder (ASD), in which the stress reaction occurs immediately after an extremely traumatic event (e.g. after experiencing a tsunami); (iii) adjustment disorder, which describes an individual’s inability to adjust to a stressful life event (e.g. inability to come to terms with a diagnosis of terminal illness); (iv) post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which typically occurs in response to the experience of life-threatening circumstances and in which the individual may experience flashbacks long after the traumatic event itself.

Course

In this course, Professor Femi Oyebode (University of Birmingham) explores anxiety and anxiety-related disorders. In the first lecture, we think about the general nature of emotions and how we experience them. In the second lecture, we think about anxiety and anxiety disorders more specifically. In the third lecture, we think about phobias, including specific phobia, social phobia and agoraphobia. Next, we think about obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and its relation to anxiety. In the fifth and final lecture, we think about stress-related conditions such as acute stress disorder (ASD), adjustment disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Lecturer

Professor Oyebode is an expert in descriptive and clinical psychopathology. He is an authority on the cognitive neuropsychiatry of delusional misidentification syndromes and on other rare and unusual psychiatric syndromes. He is the author of Sims’ Symptoms in the Mind: textbook of descriptive psychopathology. This is the leading English language text on psychopathology and has been translated into Estonian, Italian, Korean and Portuguese He is also a recognised expert in medical humanities writing about the value of literature to medicine.