PSYCHOPATHOLOGY

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does psychopathology mean? 

• PSYCHOPATHOLOGY (noun)
  The noun PSYCHOPATHOLOGY has 2 senses:

1. the branch of psychology concerned with abnormal behavior

2. the branch of medicine dealing with the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders

  Familiarity information: PSYCHOPATHOLOGY used as a noun is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• PSYCHOPATHOLOGY (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

The branch of psychology concerned with abnormal behavior

Classified under:

Nouns denoting cognitive processes and contents

Synonyms:

abnormal psychology; psychopathology

Hypernyms ("psychopathology" is a kind of...):

psychological science; psychology (the science of mental life)

Derivation:

psychopathologic (suffering from an undiagnosed mental disorder)

Sense 2

Meaning:

The branch of medicine dealing with the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders

Classified under:

Nouns denoting cognitive processes and contents

Synonyms:

psychiatry; psychological medicine; psychopathology

Hypernyms ("psychopathology" is a kind of...):

medical specialty; medicine (the branches of medical science that deal with nonsurgical techniques)

Domain member category:

major depressive episode ((psychiatry) a state of depression with all the classic symptoms (anhedonia and lethargy and sleep disturbance and despondency and morbid thoughts and feelings of worthlessness and sometimes attempted suicide) but with no known organic dysfunction)

projection ((psychiatry) a defense mechanism by which your own traits and emotions are attributed to someone else)

rationalisation; rationalization ((psychiatry) a defense mechanism by which your true motivation is concealed by explaining your actions and feelings in a way that is not threatening)

reaction formation ((psychiatry) a defense mechanism in which a person unconsciously develops attitudes and behavior that are the opposite of unacceptable repressed desires and impulses and serve to conceal them)

regression ((psychiatry) a defense mechanism in which you flee from reality by assuming a more infantile state)

repression ((psychiatry) the classical defense mechanism that protects you from impulses or ideas that would cause anxiety by preventing them from becoming conscious)

anorexia nervosa ((psychiatry) a psychological disorder characterized by somatic delusions that you are too fat despite being emaciated)

disturbance; folie; mental disorder; mental disturbance; psychological disorder ((psychiatry) a psychological disorder of thought or emotion; a more neutral term than mental illness)

anxiety; anxiousness ((psychiatry) a relatively permanent state of worry and nervousness occurring in a variety of mental disorders, usually accompanied by compulsive behavior or attacks of panic)

resistance ((psychiatry) an unwillingness to bring repressed feelings into conscious awareness)

repress; suppress (put out of one's consciousness)

analyse; analyze; psychoanalyse; psychoanalyze (subject to psychoanalytic treatment)

confabulate (unconsciously replace fact with fantasy in one's memory)

expansive (marked by exaggerated feelings of euphoria and delusions of grandeur)

overcompensation ((psychiatry) an attempt to overcome a real or imagined defect or unwanted trait by overly exaggerating its opposite)

isolation ((psychiatry) a defense mechanism in which memory of an unacceptable act or impulse is separated from the emotion originally associated with it)

intellectualisation; intellectualization ((psychiatry) a defense mechanism that uses reasoning to block out emotional stress and conflict)

idealisation; idealization ((psychiatry) a defense mechanism that splits something you are ambivalent about into two representations--one good and one bad)

displacement ((psychiatry) a defense mechanism that transfers affect or reaction from the original object to some more acceptable one)

denial ((psychiatry) a defense mechanism that denies painful thoughts)

defence; defence mechanism; defence reaction; defense; defense mechanism; defense reaction ((psychiatry) an unconscious process that tries to reduce the anxiety associated with instinctive desires)

conversion ((psychiatry) a defense mechanism represses emotional conflicts which are then converted into physical symptoms that have no organic basis)

compensation ((psychiatry) a defense mechanism that conceals your undesirable shortcomings by exaggerating desirable behaviors)

acting out ((psychiatry) the display of previously inhibited emotions (often in actions rather than words); considered to be healthy and therapeutic)

confabulation ((psychiatry) a plausible but imagined memory that fills in gaps in what is remembered)

autism ((psychiatry) an abnormal absorption with the self; marked by communication disorders and short attention span and inability to treat others as people)

paramnesia ((psychiatry) a disorder of memory in which dreams or fantasies are confused with reality)

echolalia ((psychiatry) mechanical and meaningless repetition of the words of another person (as in schizophrenia))

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "psychopathology"):

alienism (an obsolete term for the study and treatment of mental illness)

mental hygiene; psychotherapeutics; psychotherapy (the branch of psychiatry concerned with psychological methods)

Derivation:

psychopathologic; psychopathological (suffering from an undiagnosed mental disorder)