Lecture 18: What Happens When Things Go Wrong: Mental Illness, Part I

What this lecture covers

This lecture opens the course's unit on psychopathology, the study of mental illness. It sits after the social psychology unit and begins a two-part treatment of clinical psychology, continued in the next lecture. No transcript or chapter breakdown is available for this video, so this summary is based on its title and position in the course only.

Based on the course sequence, this lecture likely introduces the basic questions clinical psychology asks: what counts as a mental illness, how it is diagnosed, and how it differs from ordinary variation in mood, thought, or behavior. It would set up the more detailed coverage of specific disorders that follows in Part II.

Key ideas

• Psychopathology: the branch of psychology concerned with the definition, causes, and treatment of mental illness.
• Course sequence: this is the first of two lectures on mental illness, continued in "What Happens When Things Go Wrong: Mental Illness, Part II."
• No further detail available: without a transcript, description, or chapter list for this video, the specific content covered cannot be summarized further here.

Before you watch

• Review the preceding lecture on stereotypes and social judgment, since clinical diagnosis raises related questions about how people are categorized and labeled.
• Keep in mind that Part II of this topic follows immediately after this lecture in the course.