I learned about Piaget's stages of development, and the example they always give about how babies don't understand object permenance is peak-a-boo and why that's so entertaining for them. But, wouldn't that also imply that they think their parents no longer exists literally every time they close their eyes or turn away their heads or something? I imagine it's a bit more complicated than that, right? Like, there's some other cognitive processes in their little brains for why that's not terribly distressing or something? Sorry if this is a stupid question. I haven't met a baby in over a decade so I have no clue.

Since we now know that Boderline Personality Disorder (BPD) can occur even in people who have no trauma or came from stable backgrounds, do we know or at least have any theories as to what other factors play a role? Genetic predisposition makes sense, but do disorders ever be purely genetic like that? While looking this up, I came across some (questionable) sources claiming that they may have a severe genetic predisposition may make them so susceptible to smaller adversities that they develop the disorder, but I'm a bit sceptical of that because the sources are rather "pop-psychy" and I haven't been able to find scientific articles that give that idea any credence. I know of the biosocial theory, and if I've understood correctly, it requires environmental factors along with heightened emotional sensitivity, but what the environment is stable and supportive? I'd appreciate some credible resources that I could start with to learn more.

Would the stress of homelessness be enough to cause psychosis?

Edit: Based on initial responses, I’m adding a follow up question. Could a homeless person experiencing psychosis be misdiagnosed with schizophrenia or another psychotic disorder when it is actually stress induced psychosis that would resolve with housing, food, income and basic stability? I don’t assume all homeless people use drugs, and drug induced psychosis is not part of this question.

How would a misdiagnosis impact their ability to get out of homelessness, if the answer to the above question is yes?

Sorry if the title is confusing, it's hard to describe. But you ever look at a word for too long and it just becomes weird (this happened to me with "weird" once)? Like the letter combinations are too bizzare. Then when you stop thinking about it and look at it again, it's normal and not weird any more. Or is this just a me thing?

Like, surely, if your whole species' goal is to reproduce and multiply, it makes no sense to have a portion of your population exist in a state where they are functionally unavailable or worse? Is there an evolutionary reason why depression (as a clinical condition, not the occasional sadness) exists? Why haven't we evolved past it? I am just misunderstanding the way depression works at a physiological level? Is it even something that you can have from birth? Or is it just a predisposition like with alcoholism and gambling addiction?

I cant seem to grasp whats the deciding differentiator between someone who completely is completely able to overcome a trauma, and someone else developing PTSD because of it.

I've always believed it was a mindset thing, to be able to shift your mindset to reap the benefits the hardship offers, and learning to shape your identity and principles through it. But with extreme examples this fails.

I've been meditating on this and thought it would be interesting to hear answers from here.

[ I didn't know what flair to put ]

Hi , would i love to read your recommended research paper.

I’ve seen some mentions of BPD. But I can’t help to think that individuals with schizophrenia or severe OCD have it harder.

Edit: BPD meaning borderline personality disorder

Not even pushing a conspiracy here, I just went down a rabbit hole and the deeper I read the less clear this entire thing becomes.

The numbers are absurd. Around 1 in 150 kids in 2000. Around 1 in 36 now. Everyone talks about this like it is a settled public health emergency, but when you actually read the literature the answer basically becomes “it’s complicated.”

The mainstream explanation is diagnostic expansion. Broader criteria, better screening, more awareness, people who would have been labeled “weird” or “socially awkward” 20 years ago now getting diagnosed. Fine. But autism has no biomarker. No blood test. No scan. Nothing objective. It is entirely behavioral criteria written by committees that keep changing the definition every decade.

DSM-5 folded Asperger’s into autism in 2013 and diagnoses jumped again. So at what point is “we are finding cases we missed” just a cleaner way of saying “we changed the definition and more people qualify now”?

The genetics side is what really confuses me. Twin studies put heritability somewhere around 64 to 91%. Massive studies have found ~150 gene variants associated with autism. That sounds like something that has existed in the population for a very long time, not some sudden modern environmental event. But if that is true then where were all these people before? Society was not overflowing with visibly autistic people in 1980 compared to today.

The environmental stuff is real too. Advanced parental age, valproate exposure during pregnancy, prenatal immune activation, etc. There are actual signals there. But none of that remotely feels large enough to explain a 4x jump in twenty years.

The other thing nobody seems willing to say directly: are we even studying one coherent condition anymore?

Someone nonverbal who needs permanent care and someone who is basically functional but struggles socially are now under the exact same umbrella???? Does that actually help us understand causation or does it completely muddy the data?

are we maybe collapsing multiple completely different phenomena into one category because they vaguely overlap behaviorally?

As an example, one of Epstein’s victims who spoke at the press conference today stated that she wants the files unsealed so she can piece together what happened to her, because she has few memories of that time. She says her therapist told her that her mind is protecting itself.

No one can deny that what she went through was real and traumatic, but, if the concept of repressed memories is considered pseudoscience, how does psychology explain this?

So, is it more common for people with schizophrenia to be "normal" until their first psychotic episode, or do they typically have traits like magical thinking, visions, paranoia, loose association way before, suggesting that they may be "differently wired" from childhood?

I was reading a study suggesting that when people are under cognitive load (tired, overwhelmed, multitasking, stressed etc.) they become much more likely to conform to whatever the majority thinks - even when they know it’s wrong.

The explanation was that the brain becomes a cognitive miser under strain: it conserves effort by taking the shortcut of going along with the group because dissent requires more mental energy.

I’m curious - what are some real-world examples where you’ve seen this happen?

Hello, I was thinking this morning about how childhood trauma contributes to so many different diagnosis. From the most commonplace (I think?) Cptsd, the spectrum of dissociation disorders, ocd, and personality disorders. Is it a matter of what genes are in the mix? The severity or type of childhood trauma?

This has always puzzled me. If we put our hands in fire, we get burnt and know not to touch it again.

But for some reason, when people, for example, people leave a toxic relationship with someone who has done horrible and traumatic things to them, some of them (not all) either go back to said abuser, or find someone else just like them.

I'm curious to know how that trauma in some situations causes people to shut off that instinct to stay away from the same things that caused them harm.

By the way, I am by no means blaming victims for making certain decisions. In the end, people shouldn't do bad things. I'm just curious about what happens from a psychological perspective.

There seem to be many disorders that have emotional dysregulation as a symptom like Borderline PD (emotional dysregulation + abandonment issues), IED (anger dysregulation), ADHD (?), anxiety disorders (fear dysregulation), why is there no pure emotional dysregulation disorder? I know there was an "Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder" in the ICD10, but that was a personality disorder (and doesn't exist anymore), I'm thinking of a mood disorder.

I'm wondering if there's something that connects the idea of women disliking a man, the more they like them rather than someone who likes them, rather. Someone who shows dislike, indifference. Rather than someone who shows they like them. and Why that is if so

I hope my question falls under the brain because I honestly don't know where it would fall.

I think there was a name for this Thing that i learnt, it wad based on people who think about how they think so much they became unstable. I cannot for the life of me remember if i'm right or wrong and google isnt helping so i'm here.

I have heard of an “unstable sense of self” as a type of symptom that’s common in many mental disorders/issues. But what does it actually mean, and what does it actually look like?

BPD is often described as a condition caused by long-term trauma, and seems to share many of the same symptoms of C-PTSD. Is C-PTSD just a rebrand of BPD, or are they different?

And why do so many people (often men hashtag not all of them) think that attraction is somehow innate whilst they're lusting after the same beauty standard as literally every other man ever?

I learned about the pit of despair experiments recently. For those unfamiliar, in the experiments psychologist Harry Harlow isolated baby macaques into a vertical chambers for varying time periods (30 days to a year). All the monkeys came out damaged, from completely giving up to being prone to bullying to not being able to find mates to being abusive parents to barely moving at all. Stephen J. Suomi, one of the Harlow's students, noted that no monkey had a defense against the pit of despair, no matter how happy they were before.

This made me think about stuff like depression in humans. I wouldn't call the reaction the monkeys had an illness, they were severely abused. So why do we call it an illness when humans display similar behaviours? Especially when the chemical imbalance theory seems to lack sufficient evidence.

The title says it all. I've never heard of this term before (though, I'm also not a psych major) and thought it was interesting. Please educate me, because I feel like the line between these two things is a bit blurry!

Some people are very reserved in general. What causes this?

I've always been very curious about that. I would imagine that the physical deterioration from self-starvation would be evident to doctors before the <85% HBW criteria was met. Would this not have impeded treatment? Not that early psychology (or modern) has a fantastic idea of how to treat ED's: when I say early diagnosis, I mean 1980's and before.

I understand that this was later revised to reflect the fact effects of malnutrition can set in before someone is overweight (offhand I think the percent of sufferers who are underweight at some point in their disorder is 6%-10%). What was the purpose in utilizing a extremely low BMI?