PSYC30014 The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
2024 STANDARD Assignment
Assignment Format: Argumentative Essay
Word limit: 2000 words
Submission deadline: 8am, Monday April 29th, 2024.
Special Note: PSYC30014 students should refer to the psychology student manuals provided
on Canvas to familiarise themselves with the precise details of policies and procedures
related to assignment excess word count penalties, late submission penalties, and extension
request procedures.
Essay Task
1. Discuss the following topic statement:
“DSM-5-TR anxiety disorders do not represent genuine states of mental illness”.
2. In discussing the topic statement, examine a minimum of 2 of the following issues:
a) The prevalence, reliability, and validity of an anxiety disorder diagnosis.
b) Overlap of anxiety with trait characteristics like neuroticism.
c) Treatment outcomes and efficacy for anxiety disorders.
d) Biomarkers and/or behavioural indicators of anxiety.
e) Contemporary models of psychopathology (e.g., HiTOP).
f) The intersection between culture and mental illness.
3. Your essay must additionally include discussion and logical recommendations regarding
useful future actions that could be taken in addressing the issues that you choose to
examine.
Advice on approaching this essay
Develop a contention
In approaching this essay, you should develop a contention based on the literature that you
research. This contention may be in overall support of the essay topic statement, or not.
Your contention need not be polarised either way but may embody a more complex
position based on consideration of points for and against the topic statement. Indeed, it is
likely that your contention will comprise layers, such that: 1) an overall contention is
presented based on consideration of all of the issues and evidence that you present
throughout the essay; 2) your position regarding the topic statement as it pertains to each
of the specific issues (see above) that you examine is also presented. Any overall
position/positions on each issue examined you choose is fine, but your position must be
based on evidence – the evidence that you will discuss in the body of your essay.
We strongly encourage you to take whatever position appeals to you the most based on
your literature review and be clear about that position from the beginning. There are
degrees of grey within the topic and the six issues that we have laid out for you to choose
from can each be discussed from multiple perspectives. In our experience, better essays in
response to these types of topics often don’t merely adopt a polarised position such as
“anxiety disorders are over-diagnosed responses to everyday circumstances and never
represent genuine states of mental illness” or “anxiety disorders by definition represent
mental illnesses – end of story”. Better essays are likely to explore the competing tensions
and overlapping issues that are relevant to agreement or disagreement with the topic. For
example, such a nuanced approach might look like any of the following overall positions:
• Some of the signs and symptoms that comprise anxiety disorders show significant
overlap with experiences that many people have in everyday life.
• Some individuals presenting with anxiety may merely exhibit elevated levels of worry
or other symptoms that do not surpass a diagnostic threshold.
• Understanding individuals in context is key in determining if their experiences of
anxiety indicate a state of mental illness.
• There is likely to be a class of individuals whose everyday experiences have some
overlap with and some independence from anxiety disorders.
• Destigmatisation campaigns have reframed anxiety as a normal and relatively benign
circumstance, and therein, devalued and obfuscated the experience of clinically
significant suffering.
• Some other nuanced position. Whatever your position, you can choose to talk about
anxiety disorders generally, or specifically as regards one or two disorders, or some
combination of this.

The task for you is to work out your position for your whole paper. Be clear about your
position from the beginning and use your essay to tease out, explore and support the
position that you ultimately take (see above for examples).



Structure your essay appropriately
Structurally, your essay should have an introduction, a body, and a concluding section.
Following best writing practices, the introduction will contain your thesis statement (your
main contention or position), the body will provide support for your thesis statement, and
the conclusion will reiterate and summarise your thesis statement. Note, this does not
mean that you should write the exact same thesis statement over and over again. Each
paragraph should also follow this logical writing format and have its own objective within
the context of the broader essay. In other words, each paragraph should be making a case
for something and the sentences within that paragraph should be making that case and
ultimately supporting your broader argument.

Given the size of the essay, your introduction may span more than one paragraph. The body
of your essay should present arguments in support of and opposed to the topic statement
and should have sections dedicated to each of core (again, see above) issues you examine.
Discussion of the broad issues for consideration and the models you examine may occur
within single paragraphs. In other words, you do not need to separately discuss issues and
models. Instead, you should discuss issues and models together. Your concluding paragraph
should summarise your essay, resolve the current state of the situation, and outline a logical
future direction/s for addressing (or at least starting to address) the issues raised. There are
of course, more than just these main points that you should build into your essay, and you
should refer to the marking criteria presented below and essay writing resources available
on the LMS for guidance here. Your first lab class will address the essay and you can also
ask any questions you may have on the LMS discussion board.
The importance of writing with integrity
Developing skills in proper paraphrasing and producing original work is a critical part of
learning how to write an essay in psychology. Avoiding plagiarism is an academic and
ethical imperative, and therefore, testing for plagiarism is an important part of the essay
marking process (see criterion E.1 below). We know, however, that students who study
PSYC300014 have varying degrees of knowledge and skills and avoiding this pitfall, knowing
how to test the originality of their work (even without Turnitin!), and understanding how to
write original work with confidence. To this end and to avoid the various academic
penalties that come with plagiarism, we recommend that you take advantage of the
following resources:
1. Dr Groot has recorded a video on the topic of plagiarism and paraphrasing. This video
gives practical advice and examples of what does and doesn’t constitute problematic work.
You can watch the video here: https://youtu.be/GHgAbD_FJY8.
2. The University of Melbourne provides a range of resources to help students understand
potential pitfalls around poor paraphrasing and plagiarism, and to develop skills in writing
with integrity. You can access information, videos, and practical modules at the following
link: https://academicintegrity.unimelb.edu.au/#academic-integrity
3. We will also be able to provide general advice around approaches to proper paraphrasing,
quoting, and citation, through practical class discussion and live-streamed Q&A consultation
during semester. In addition, the Academic Skills Unit provide support and advice, and you
can access their many useful writing resources here:
https://students.unimelb.edu.au/academic-skills
4. Do not use AI. The use of AI is considered by the University to constitute academic
misconduct. Formal academic penalty is a expectable outcome for the identified use of AI
or of plagiarism and Canvas and Turnitin have plagiarism and AI detectors. Aside from
avoiding negative outcomes, there are other reasons to avoid AI in your work. One is that AI
services consistently return incorrect information, false citations, and a commit a range of
other academic no-nos. The various errors to which I refer are commonly undetected by
non-experts (i.e. undergraduate students completing assignments) but are easily detectable
by topic and discipline experts (i.e. your markers). The most important reason not to use AI
in your academic work, however, is to avoid cheating yourself of the opportunity to grow.
Throughout your degree, you are learning new knowledges, new ways of thinking and
learning, and new skills, including writing. If you think about it, you are sacrificing, time,
effort, money, and more, to achieve this. Growth is to be found in the doing, so do yourself
a solid and ditch the AI for this essay.
Starting readings
The following readings are intended to provide you with a starting point from which to
approach this essay. These readings are not compulsory. Instead, they are suggestions to
help you get started and you are welcome to include these in your essay if you would like
to. These readings are available on the LMS via the “Readings Online” tab. We expect that
you will go beyond these resources in your research for this essay.
• Conceptual Considerations of Psychiatric Disorders:
Kendler, K.S. (2016). The nature of psychiatric disorders. World Psychiatry, 15, 5-12.
• DSM-5-TR and Anxiety Disorders
The following readings are available with UoM login. When prompted select ‘login via
institution’ and the University of Melbourne.
DSM-5-TR introduction
https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.books.9780890425787.Introduction
DSM-5-TR Anxiety Disorders introduction. After reading the introduction, you can review
criteria and more on each anxiety disorder using the ‘Sections’ button in the top-left of the
screen. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.books.9780890425787.x05_Anxiety_Disorders
• Anxiety Disorders in General:
Craske, Stein, Eley, Milad, Holmes, Rapee, & Wittchen (2017). Anxiety Disorders. Nature
Reviews Disease Primers, 3 (17024), 1-19.
Brown & Barlow (2009). A proposal for a dimensional classification system based on the
shared features of the DSM-IV anxiety and mood disorders: Implications for assessment and
treatment. Psychological Assessment, 21, 256-271.
Stein et al. (2014). Anxiety disorders, obsessive-compulsive and related disorders, trauma-
and stressor-related disorders, and dissociative disorders in DSM-5. American Journal of
Psychiatry, 171, 611-613.
• Generalized Anxiety Disorder as a Specific Example:
Ruscio et al. (2017). Cross-sectional comparison of the epidemiology of DSM-5 Generalized
Anxiety Disorder across the globe. JAMA Psychiatry, 74, 465-475.
• Overlap with Related Characteristics:
Cuijpers et al. (2010). Economic costs of neuroticism: A population-based study. Archives of
General Psychiatry, 67, 1086-1093.
Barlow et al. (2013). The nature, diagnosis, and treatment of neuroticism: Back to the
future. Clinical Psychological Science, 2, 344-365.
• Cultural Considerations as regards the Conceptualisation of Mental Illness :
Jackson, H. J., & Haslam, N. (2022). Ill-defined: Concepts of mental health and illness are
becoming broader, looser, and more benign. Australasian Psychiatry.
https://doi.org/10.1177/10398562221077898
Psychology writing resources
The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association forms the basis of APA
Style and provides guidelines for scholarly writing in psychology and related disciplines. You
can access the manual through the library (http://go.unimelb.edu.au/a9qj). The companion
website (https://apastyle.apa.org/) summarises much of the manual’s contents and includes
webinars, tutorials, and other resources that can help you with your writing.
The following texts provide general guidance on essay writing. They are also available
through the library (https://library.unimelb.edu.au/).

Burton, L. J. (2021). An interactive approach to writing essays and research reports in
psychology (5th ed.). Wiley.
Dickerson, P. (2021). How to write brilliant psychology essays. Sage.
Mewburn, I., Firth, K., & Lehmann, S. (2021). Level up your essays: How to get better grades
at university. NewSouth.
O’Shea, R. P., & McKenzie, W. A. (2021). Writing for psychology. (7th ed.). Cengage.
Assessment
The criteria that markers will use to evaluate your essay are presented below. You should
also refer to these criteria in the planning and development of your essay. Some additional
interpretation of the main criteria domains is provided below the table. Please refer to the
PSYC30014 subject manual for details of the marking reliability process that will be
undertaken to ensure that your paper is accurately assessed.
Assessment criteria
A. Title Weight
A1. Title Content • Clearly and concisely outlines the main topic of the
essay, including the author’s thesis (i.e., central
argument).
2%
B. Introduction Weight
B1. Topic • Introduces the topic that is the focus of the essay.
• Defines key terms and summarises essential background
information accurately and in appropriate detail.
10%
B2. Importance • Establishes the importance and relevance of the topic. 4%
B3. Thesis and
Direction
• Clearly states the author’s position (thesis).
• Provides a succinct overview of the author’s argument
and the direction of the essay.
6%
C. Body Weight
C1. Argument • Critically engages with the topic to develop a clear and
cogent argument for the author’s stated thesis.
20%
• Supports key points in the argument with credible
evidence drawn from relevant scholarly literature.
• Explains how the evidence supports the author’s thesis.
C2. Organisation • Structures the argument coherently, with a clear and
logical progression of ideas throughout.
• Guides the reader through the argument, with each
point building on the next and related to the whole.
10%
C3. Understanding • Demonstrates understanding of all relevant aspects of
the topic under consideration (e.g., theoretical concepts,
empirical findings, and so on).
10%
D. Conclusion Weight
D1. Summary and
Synthesis
• Summarises the argument by succinctly reviewing the
key points developed throughout the essay.
• Resolves the discussion with reference to the author’s
thesis
15%
D2. Significance • Briefly reflects on the significance of the author’s
conclusions with regard to the topic and may provide
useful suggestions for future research.
5%
E.
Writing/Presentation Weight
E1. Written
Expression
• Demonstrates clarity and conciseness in written
expression.
• Demonstrates continuity and flow within and across all
sections of the report.
• Exhibits a professional tone suitable for academic
writing.
• Word choice is appropriate and sentences are well-
constructed, with no errors in spelling, grammar, or
usage.
• Contains an appropriate amount of original material.
8%
E2. Paper Formatting • Adheres to APA Style formatting requirements (e.g., with
regard to page numbers, headings, line spacing, and
paragraph alignment and indentation).
5%
E3. Referencing • Works are cited appropriately in-text and in the
reference list, following the requirements of APA Style.
5%
Assessment and feedback
Your work will be evaluated according to the assessment criteria, with the table below used
as a guide for marking in line with the standards of the University of Melbourne. Your tutor
will also provide some commentary on your essay.
Grade Range Example Descriptor
H1 80–100 Excellent performance;
shows a high to very
high level of proficiency.
H2A 75–79 Very good performance;
shows a high level of
proficiency.
H2B 70–74 Good performance;
shows a sound level of
proficiency.
H3 65–69 Competent
performance; shows a
fair level of proficiency.
P 50–64 Satisfactory
performance; shows an
acceptable or adequate
level of proficiency.
N 0–49 Unsatisfactory
performance; shows an
inadequate level of
proficiency.
Understanding the assessment criteria: Some pointers
Title
The title of the essay should be focused and succinct. Ensure that the title captures the main
topic of your essay and that it includes only essential terms. Avoid using abbreviations in the
title; instead, write out all terms in full. The title should also convey your position on the
topic under consideration, thereby setting up readers expectations for what will be argued
in the essay.
Introduction
The introduction sets the focus of the essay by establishing what the topic is, why it is
important or relevant, what the author’s position on the topic is, and how that position will
be argued for throughout the essay.
As you write the introduction, you will need to define key terms and summarise essential
background information, so the reader understands the broader context for the essay. You
will also need to explain why the topic is important or relevant in a way that attempts to
engage the reader and captures their interest. Finally, you will need to clearly state your
own position with regard to the topic (i.e., your thesis) and provide a concise overview of
the argument you will develop in support of it.
Because the introduction as a whole needs to be concise, you should aim to include only
essential information; that is, information that orients the reader to the purpose of your
essay. Avoid material that is tangential, off-topic, or beyond the scope of the essay you have
been asked to write.
Argument
The body of the essay is dedicated to analysis. The aim of this section is to provide well-
reasoned support for your stated thesis—to develop a cogent argument. Your argument will
most likely involve a few key points. Each one will need to be supported by credible
evidence, drawn from relevant research, and you will need to explain how the point
supports your thesis. Assessors will thus be paying attention to your ability to critically
engage with the topic and to how you evaluate and use evidence throughout your essay.
Organisation
As you present your argument, it is important to consider the progression of ideas. The
reader needs to understand how the key points in your argument relate to one another and
to the whole. For this reason, it is a good idea to sketch out your ideas before you start
writing the essay. This process encourages you to think about the overall structure of your
argument and the order in which points are presented. Because your argument likely has
many points, it is important that they all fit together neatly. Assessors will be paying
attention to whether your ideas are presented in a logical order and how you guide the
reader through the main points in your argument.

Understanding
Throughout the essay you will need to draw on relevant material from the literature to
make your argument. This means you will need to refer to particular theoretical concepts,
research methods, and empirical findings as you go about elaborating each point. In doing
so, you show the reader your understanding of the topic and the associated literature.
Assessors will therefore consider the accuracy of the information you have presented and
whether it reflects an appropriate level of understanding.
Conclusion
The conclusion summarises and integrates the key points developed throughout the body to
bring the essay to a satisfying close. This section is not intended as a repeat of the
introduction; rather, you need to bring all the strands of your argument together to resolve
the discussion with reference to your thesis. The conclusion also gives you the opportunity
to reflect more broadly on the significance of your argument, such as the wider implications
it might have, and to discuss directions that future research on the topic may wish to
explore.
Writing and presentation
Throughout your essay, readers will be paying attention to how you express yourself in
writing, how you format the paper, and how you reference work from other authors. You
can find advice relevant to these matters in the Publication Manual.