Thousands of years ago, before the existence of Egyptian civilization, the regions of North Africa that surround the Nile River were fertile grasslands and woodlands, providing farmland and grazing land for communities of people. Historians estimate that around 3500 b.c.e., however, the environment in these grasslands began to change dramatically, perhaps because of overgrazing of the land, and eventually the region turned into desert, primarily the Sahara. Looking for a place where they...

Agriculture arose independently in many locations throughoutthe world, and each time it was the result of people’s manipulating plants and animals that already lived around them. InAfrica this process happened numerous times in diff erent locations. Africa’s geography prevented the smooth transmissionof crops and livestock from place to place. As a result, peopleon the continent never had the chance to develop large agricultural civilizations such as those in Mesopotamia.Egypt was...

IntroductionThe term paranoid can be applied to symptoms, syndromes, or personality types. Paranoid symptoms are overvalued ideas or delusions that are most commonly persecutory, but not always so (see Box 1.4, page 12). Paranoid syndromes are those in which paranoid delusions form a prominent part of a characteristic constellation of symptoms, such as pathological jealousy or erotomania. In paranoid personality disorder, there is excessive self-reference and undue sensitiveness to real or...

IntroductionOf all the major psychiatric syndromes, schizophrenia is perhaps the most difficult to define and describe. This partly reflects the fact that, over the past century or more, widely divergent concepts have been held in different countries and by different people. Although there is now a greater consensus, substantialuncertainties remain. Indeed, schizophrenia remains the best example of the fundamental issues with which psychiatry continues to grapple—concepts of disease,...

  Introduction In the previous chapter we considered depressive disorders and we now turn to bipolar disorders, another group of conditions in which depressive episodes are prominent. In bipolar disorder, however, the course is marked by at least one episode of mania or hypomania. Kraepelin (1921) brought mania and depression together as manic depressive psychosis, because he believed that the longerterm clinical course, with its tendency to recurrence of mood disturbance, was similar,...

There is no general agreement about the best method of classifying depressive disorders. A number of approaches have been tried, based on the following:● presumed aetiology● symptomatic picture● course.Classification by presumed aetiologyHistorically, depressive disorders were sometimes classified into two kinds—those in which the symptoms were caused by factors within the individual, and were independent of outside factors (endogenous depression), and those in which the symptoms were a...

  Introduction The next two chapters describe depressive disorders and bipolar disorder. These conditions are also called mood disorders because one of their main features is abnormality of mood. Nowadays the term is usually restricted to disorders in which this mood is depression or elation, but in the past some authors have included states of anxiety as well. In this book, anxiety disorders are described in Chapter 8. Mood disorders have in the past been referred to as...

In everyday speech the word ‘illness’ is used loosely. Similarly, in psychiatric practice the term ‘mental illness’ is used with little precision, and often synonymously with ‘mental disorder’. In this context, the terms ‘mental’ and ‘psychiatric’ are also used interchangeably. A good definition of mental illness is difficult to achieve, for both practical and philosophical reasons, as outlined here. In routine clinical work the...

Reciprocal determinism is a key concept in psychology, particularly in social cognitive theory, proposed by Albert Bandura, a renowned psychologist known for his work on social learning and self-efficacy. This theory suggests that behavior, personal factors, and environmental influences interact and influence each other bidirectionally. In other words, individuals are not merely influenced by external factors, but they also play an active role in shaping their environment and determining...

We all seem to act too smart, as if we are the kings/queens of the world. In reality, if we were asked to speak about ourselves for as many minutes as our age—let's say 21 minutes if that's our age—then none of us could speak for even a minute. When we have to talk about ourselves, it doesn't mean the worldly tags that we have accumulated; it means the REAL YOU.