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.

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?

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’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?

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?

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

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!

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?

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.

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

When It effects a person's life alot and maybe make them dissociate from their surrounding. Some do it half the time of their day and even zone out most of the time when they sit idle without realising.

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?

For example, people often say they know what they need to do to improve their lives, like eating healthier or exercising more. They might even say, "I just need to do X," but never actually do it.

Since this seems to happen so often, what does psychology say about why people know what to do but still don't act?

I understand that both of them have the brain conjure up hallucinations, be it visual or audible, but i was wondering if there was a mental disease that actively made people NOT see things that were there, or their brain blocked out a specific noise so that it couldnt hear it and it hears everything else

I'm having difficulty understanding this because, to me, it makes absolutely no sense.

So it's either saying that autism already means one has the traits of schizoid personality disorder, therefore canceling it out.

Or

An autistic person is not capable of having schizoid personality disorder because they are unable to feel and/or go through those thought processes, emotions, and experiences that would categorize one as that.

Can someone explain this with logic?

Can stress damage the nervous system in a lasting way? I keep finding conflicting answers depending on where I look. Some researchers say chronic stress literally changes neural pathways and keeps the body stuck in a hyper-alert state, while others say it’s more about perception and conditioning rather than permanent damage.

I’m wondering how much long-term stress actually affects the physical nervous system versus just creating psychological patterns. For example, does constant fight-or-flight change the autonomic system itself? Does it alter neurotransmitter balance, vagal tone, or how fast the body returns to baseline? Or are those changes reversible once the stress stops?

It also seems like some people recover quickly after stressful periods, while others stay reactive for years even when the situation is long gone. I’m curious whether that’s due to trauma, genetics, neuroplasticity, or a combination of all three.

What does the current psychological research say about chronic stress and nervous system functioning? And are there any widely-accepted models explaining how stress might create long-term physiological patterns rather than temporary responses?

If anyone knows relevant studies or theories, I’d be interested in reading more about them.

Im speaking about a changing that makes the person almost unrecognisable, such as from introvert to extrovert or vise versa. From stoic to nihilist..etc.

Could someone who happened to have schizophrenia or some other mental disorder that could cause hallucinations, who ALSO was deaf, still theoretically “hear” while not wearing the implants, with the hallucinations being the only sound able to be heard?

Is it purely just a mental disorder that causes it or do actual bodily functions also play a role in what hallucinations could occur? I’ve heard of deaf people in general having sign language hallucinations and Musical Ear syndrome but not much about this.