Developmental Psychopathology Class

This page is an experiment in Spring 2022, using a Wikiversity page as a place to put student questions, discussion, and resources.

From a pedagogical perspective, this is accomplishing the same thing as a wiki tool inside of Sakai or other learning management environments, with the twist that it is completely open. This means that the discussion and resources will be available to everyone, not just students enrolled in the course. Because of that, no grades or confidential information should be posted here; nor should anything that is copyrighted without a clear license for open distribution (CC BY SA or more permissive, 3.0 or newer license).

If you are an experienced Wikimedia editor, please do not judge! Especially please do not use the standards that would be used for a Wikipedia page. Primary data sources may be acceptable for these pages, for example. In a lot of ways, some of the pages will look more like what is typical of sandboxes. The content is going to look unpolished, fragmentary, and follow some directions that will seem idiosyncratic unless you have the larger perspective of the discussion and goals of the class. Edits to help organize, improve the structure or indexing, or technical aspects of referencing, preventing link rot, and so forth are highly welcome. Why not use sandboxes? Because students finish the class, people graduate, professors get sick or die -- and we hope that this experiment might have a life beyond one semester.

Course description

This course is for advanced level undergraduate students, particularly those interested in attending graduate school in a psychology-related field. This section is taught more like a graduate course than an undergraduate course. There will be a few days where the lecture will fill the meeting time. More commonly, we will use a “flipped classroom” format where the reading and review of PowerPoints happens outside of class, and the class time is used for exercises and discussion.

The course provides an overview of several behavioral and emotional disorders of childhood and adolescence. Not all disorders of childhood and adolescence will be covered in the course. We concentrate on those disorders that are the most commonly diagnosed. (Some disorders not covered in this course are discussed in your course text if you are interested in reading about them, and some of these are available for topics for your paper and presentation.) The course focuses on the description, assessment, epidemiology, etiology and treatment of each disorder. We also spend a lot of time comparing and contrasting different ways of classifying what is happening with youths and families, and unpack some of the consequences of different models and their assumptions.

We also use six clinical cases throughout the semester to connect the ideas and techniques with people. The vignettes are based on real cases. They illustrate some of the challenges in moving from the textbook and research to real applications.

We will also build, improve, and organize a lot of resources online. These will be available to you after the class finishes. More exciting, they also will be available to the general public, so we are helping North Carolina and the global community as you learn technical and conceptual skills that you will use again, too.

Disclosure

The materials shared here and activities are attached to courses taught by Eric Youngstrom, PhD. He is is professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience (and also Psychiatry) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He also is an adjunct professor of Psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University, and an adjunct professor of Psychology at Korea University in Seoul. Students are most likely to interact with these pages in classes at UNC Chapel Hill and at Korea University.

He is the co-founder and Executive Director of a nonprofit organization called Helping Give Away Psychological Science (HGAPS.org). HGAPS is incorporated as a charity in North Carolina, USA, and recognized as a 501c3 nonprofit by the IRS. HGAPS has affiliated student service clubs at universities, and a Wikimedia User Group. Youngstrom has been teaching for multiple decades, and started to change his mind about Wikipedia in late 2014. Since then he has gradually evolved in his thinking from "this is an interesting side project... it is the icing on the cake" to "holy cow, this is THE CAKE!" After that epiphany, it has been a matter of working through what things are okay to share "as is," what things need editing or redaction (such as his cell phone number), and how to migrate from university-specific licenses to open platforms.

Activities

Students gain exposure to Wiki editing by making accounts, completing the Wikipedia Adventure training modules, and learning about the reach of Wikimedia via slides and recorded presentations and discussion.

Clinical first impressions

Category versus continuum exercise

Let's make a treatment plan

Writing a paper

Peer review

Making an infographic for the public

Upgrading the assessment and treatment for a case