Psychology

Essay

• Your essay should be no longer than 1500 words (approximately 5 pages).
• Essays must be submitted electronically on SAKAI. Only electronically submitted essays that have passed through turnitin will be marked.
• You will be provided with 2 essay submission tabs. One to check and correct any originality issues and the second for final submission.
• All referencing should be correct and no plagiarism should be present (this includes copying from the text as well as including ideas obtained from readings which are not referenced). Any suspected instances of plagiarism will be further investigated using plagiarism software; students can be excluded from the University for plagiarising.
• The essay should be written in a clear, coherent manner and should adhere to academic conventions.
• It is a requirement of this essay that you independently source at least four references from academic books or journal articles (i.e. not from popular sources like You magazine, or worse, Cosmopolitan...). These references need to be used in the essay and included in the reference list. Essays submitted without at least five references will not receive more than 50% (i.e. an exceptional essay without extra references can receive a maximum of 50%).

  Essay topic The essay will be a critical and diagnostic analysis of the case study given below. Your essay will follow the standard essay guidelines stated above and will, in essence, be an academic paper. In your essay, discuss the potential diagnoses of the fictitious patient given in the case study. In your essay, please address the following issues in your discussion:

1. Why does the behavior constitute abnormality?
2. Diagnosis
3. Identify and justify the diagnosis or diagnoses (no more than two if you choose this route) you would make for Santana, the patient. In your discussion of this diagnosis/ diagnoses, ensure that you include a complete differential diagnosis!! A differential diagnosis is a process of considering other possible diagnoses, including a process of ruling out those diagnoses that are least likely. It is important to show your reasoning in choosing the diagnosis that you choose. Do not simply diagnose her with what you think you pick up from the case study. It is your thinking processes we are interested in seeing especially how you think about and make sense of psychopathology. Make sure your differential diagnoses are credible ones and not just random ones picked from the DSM that do not even apply to the case.
4. Ensure that you back up your diagnosis with a good description of the symptoms in the case study that meet the DSM 5 criteria for your chosen diagnosis. Include a short discussion of core symptoms that the patient does NOT meet. If you were to need more information, what additional information would you need to confirm the diagnosis?
5. Include a short discussion of any other factors given in the case study that lend support to your chosen diagnosis such as etiology etc.
6. Prognosis and causes
7. Be sure to discuss your ideas around what factors could have contributed to the person experiencing the difficulties they are experiencing. Also discuss the expected prognosis of the disorder. Prognosis is basically the likely course of a disorder. Include a brief discussion of what you think the likely or best course of treatment would be for the fictitious patient.

You may use information gathered from the case study as well as hypotheses you make about the patient to support your answer. Be sure to distinguish between the two and to relate these to academic references to support your argument. A strong paper will include gender and cultural considerations as discussed in the classes or from your extra reading in addition to the above areas.   Case study Dineo is a 20-year-old young woman who presents with suicidal ideation. She is the youngest child of a family of four children. Her older brother and sisters are aged between 34 and 40 years of age. She is currently studying towards a degree in Accounting at a University in Johannesburg. During the initial sessions, she shares that she has been feeling very demotivated and apathetic recently. She has lost all interest in her studies and does not want to spend time with her friends anymore. This appears to have begun after she called her father to tell him she had achieved a 78% average for her courses and he had responded with some disappointment. According to her, her father said “what happened? You were 2% below an 80. That’s not good enough”. Dineo shares that her father has always pushed her and demanded excellent performance from her. She has always been a straight A student and had no trouble getting into varsity. Accounting was what her father had expressed he wanted her to study. Dineo stated that her father works as a diplomat and businessman and was hardly available to her throughout childhood. Her mother died when she was 18 years old and she also describes her as largely unavailable too. Her mother was also a career woman and worked as an attorney. She had given up her career aspirations to raise Dineo’s older siblings but had returned to school and qualified as an attorney after the third child was born. She used to express how difficult it was to have to look after Dineo while at the same time pursuing her career. Dineo explains that her parents had told her that she was an “oopsie”, a child born at a time they did not plan or want to have a child. Her mother was 44 years old when she was born. She describes sensing that she was not wanted as she was sent to boarding school when she was only five years old, often only coming home for holidays four times a year. Her parents visited her at the school on occasion, but also broke their promises to visit at other times leaving her angry, sad and feeling rejected. Over time, she grew very angry and noticed that she became very desperate in her relationships with her friends and teachers. As a teenager, she started dating at the age of 14 and recalls falling in love with this boy instantly. She desperately needed to be with him all the time and whenever he had to be away or threatened to break up, she recalls feeling extremely desperate and angry and her rage often pushed him away. She recalls feeling incredibly rejected and unloved and shares that cutting little grooves on her forearm was the only thing that used to calm her down. This pattern repeated itself in many of her relationships leading her to conclude that she is “unlovable because people always leave”. At times she has tried to avoid getting too close to her friends or boyfriends yet at times she gets so incredibly lonely and feels so “dead and empty” that she desperately seeks connection. She admits that sometimes this connection has come in the form of casual sex because it makes her feel alive again, and for that moment, she feels as though she matters. However, the emptiness always returns when she returns to her normal life afterwards. Dineo explains that her studies have always been very important to her father. That is the only time she feels she exists for her dad. He sometimes praises her for her performance, and calls her to check how school is going. She says she lives and breathes for those moments.  However, she had often questioned whether she even wants to be an accountant… yet she has no idea what she would want to do instead if she wasn’t studying accounting. The last straw came for her one month ago when she felt she did well but her performance wasn’t good enough for her father. She initially raged and had the strong urge to quit school and move in with her boyfriend. However, her rage quickly turned to great sadness as she realized that she will just never ever be good enough for her father… or anyone. Over the past month, she has lost a considerable amount of weight and completely withdrawn in her shell. At times, she struggles to even get out of bed and wonders why she even lives in this “cruel world”. She is worried because her final exams are around the corner and she has no interest in studying or attending tutorials and classes. She just wants to sleep and never wake up. When she forces herself to study, she struggles to focus and fails to retain any of the information being studied. Sometimes she even hears crows and hadedas (birds) laughing at her for being such a failure. She has presented for therapy in a desperate bid for things to feel better quickly as she simply cannot go on with life feeling the way she does.