It isn't whatcha got, it's whatcha do. A behavioral view of mental health diagnoses is the kind of topic that looks straightforward until it collides with the speed, ambiguity, and competing demands of home routines, treatment sessions, interdisciplinary consultation, and health-related skill support.
Provider: BehaviorLive — via BehaviorLive
Take This Course →Including ethics, supervision, and topics like this one. New live CEU every Wednesday.
Join Free →This presentation examines the assumptions made by the DSM-V revised about mental illness and then takes a behavioral perspective on the issue. There are numerous assumptions about the nature and etiology of mental illness, and most of these assumptions, in one form or another, end up blaming the brain on the problems we see. In a manner of speaking, the brain is responsible for what we see but only in as much as it is involved in all our behavior. Regardless of differences in the brain that may or may not be causal in nature, mental health diagnoses are absolutely, positively NOT made on the basis of structural or neurochemical abnormalities. They are in fact based on behavior or lack thereof. In fact, the popular trend now is self-diagnosis. So now we have diagnoses that are almost entirely based on the verbal behavior of the person with the alleged disorder. Even when diagnoses are rendered formally, with checklists and questionnaires and perhaps even direct observation and interaction with the individual, there is still no structural or neurochemical marker used to make a decision. This presentation will cover problems and pitfalls in diagnosis and then cover the important variables to attend to when we encounter an individual with any given diagnosis. Learning Objectives: Participants will be able to describe the difference between having a mental health diagnosis and having kidney stones Participants will be able to describe the differences between the measurement used in determining a mental illness category and the measurement used to determine whether or not someone has high blood pressure Participants will be able to correctly restate the following: "He hallucinates because he has schizophrenia." Participants will be able to describe how all clinicians make mental health diagnoses (i.e., what controls their verbal behavior of rendering one diagnosis over another). Participants will be able to break down mental health diagnoses into their observable behavioral components
| Certification Body | Credits | Type |
|---|---|---|
| BACB® | 1.5 | General |
Dr. Merrill Winston is a Board Certified Behavior Analyst who has worked in the field of Developmental Disabilities for over 35 years. He has worked in small group homes, large residential facilities, secured facilities, family homes, and schools and has worked with a broad population who exhibited behavior problems that ranged from mild to life-threatening. Dr. Winston is comfortable working with both verbal and non-verbal individuals and both children and adults with a range of diagnoses. His strengths are relating to direct-care staff in a manner that sets them at ease as well as working in real-time with children and adults. Dr. Winston excels in public speaking and has given numerous presentations at various professional conferences throughout the country. His areas of interest are crisis prevention and intervention, psychotropic medication usage with special populations, and the development and implementation of training programs designed to increase the skill levels of parents, professionals, teachers, and direct-care staff.
Dig into the research behind this topic — plain-English summaries written for BCBAs.
279 research articles with practitioner takeaways
258 research articles with practitioner takeaways
244 research articles with practitioner takeaways
You earn CEUs from a dozen different places. Upload any certificate — from here, your employer, conferences, wherever — and always know exactly where you stand. Learning, Ethics, Supervision, all handled.
No credit card required. Cancel anytime.
All behavior-analytic intervention is individualized. The information on this page is for educational purposes and does not constitute clinical advice. Treatment decisions should be informed by the best available published research, individualized assessment, and obtained with the informed consent of the client or their legal guardian. Behavior analysts are responsible for practicing within the boundaries of their competence and adhering to the BACB Ethics Code for Behavior Analysts.