A to W
Beyond curriculumCTEVT PSC curriculum: on the official Psychosocial Counselor syllabus, can appear in the exam. Beyond curriculum: added for completeness, not examinable. A chip like 296.2x · F32 is the diagnosis code: the DSM-5's older ICD-9-CM number, then the ICD-10 "F-code" used in hospital records. Non-students can ignore all of these.
| Term | Plain meaning | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| Anhedonia | Losing the ability to enjoy things that used to give pleasure | Depressive disorders |
| Avolition | Loss of drive to start or finish everyday tasks | Psychosis |
| Behavioural activation | Treating low mood by scheduling small activities first and letting the mood follow, rather than waiting to feel like it | Techniques step by step |
| Biopsychosocial | Illness understood as biology, mind and social world acting together | Mental health basics |
| Cognitive defusion | Stepping back from a thought so it is seen as words in the mind, not a fact to obey ("I am having the thought that…") | Techniques step by step |
| Cognitive distortion | A habitual, unfair way of thinking, such as catastrophising | Mental health basics |
| Compulsion | A repeated act or ritual done to relieve an obsession | OCD & related |
| Conditions of worth | Rules learned early about when one deserves love ("only if I come first"); Rogers' term for what blocks growth | Approaches & forms |
| Conversion | Real body symptoms (fits, paralysis) without a matching disease | Conversion & somatic |
| Delusion | A fixed false belief that evidence cannot shift | Psychosis |
| Depersonalisation | Feeling detached from one's own body or self, as if watching oneself | Anxiety disorders |
| Derealisation | The world around feels unreal, foggy or dream-like | Anxiety disorders |
| Diathesis-stress | A built-in vulnerability that becomes illness when stress hits | Mental health basics |
| Dissociation | Mind and body disconnecting under stress: blanking out, losing time | Trauma & stressor |
| Exposure | Facing a feared thing in small planned steps until fear fades | Fear: the foundation |
| Formulation (4-P) | Predisposing, precipitating, perpetuating and protective factors turned into a plan | The counselling process |
| Grounding | Simple senses-and-breath techniques that calm the body in minutes | Tools & techniques |
| Hallucination | Hearing, seeing or feeling something that is not there | Psychosis |
| Hyperarousal | The body stuck on high alert: jumpy, sleepless, irritable | Trauma & stressor |
| Hypomania | A milder, shorter high mood with less sleep and more energy (bipolar II) | The rest of the map |
| Obsession | An unwanted thought or image that keeps intruding | OCD & related |
| Paralanguage | Everything in the voice except the words: tone, pace, volume, pauses | Communication skills |
| Peripartum | During pregnancy or in the weeks after birth | Depressive disorders |
| Post-ictal | The confused, drowsy state after an epileptic seizure | Conversion & somatic |
| Proxemics | How people use distance and seating; in counselling, sitting at an angle with no desk between | Communication skills |
| Psychoeducation | Explaining a condition to a person and family in plain words | Anxiety disorders |
| Psychosis | A break with shared reality: delusions, hallucinations, disorganisation | Psychosis |
| Reinforcement | Anything that makes a behaviour more likely to happen again | Fear: the foundation |
| Response prevention | In OCD work, staying with the trigger without doing the ritual, so the person tests the fear's prediction and learns to carry the not-knowing | Techniques step by step |
| Safety plan | A written list: warning signs, coping steps, people to call, making home safer | Suicide: assessment |
| Screening | A short questionnaire that suggests a problem; it never diagnoses | Tools & techniques |
| Somatisation | Distress expressed through the body: aches, weakness, dizziness | Conversion & somatic |
| Task-sharing | Trained non-specialists delivering care that specialists cannot reach | Wellbeing & intervention |
| Therapeutic alliance | The working bond of trust and shared purpose between counselor and client; the strongest single predictor of whether counselling helps | The counselling process |
| Tolerance | Needing more of a substance for the same effect | Substance use |
| Vasovagal | A faint caused by a sudden drop in heart rate and blood pressure | Anxiety disorders |
| Withdrawal | The body's reaction when a substance it depends on is stopped | Substance use |