It's Official!

The Great Eight is now the Great Seven. I finished my Abnormal Psych class last Friday and my grade posted this morning! I got an A in Abnormal Psych!! Woot woot! I enjoyed the class a lot and was glad to take it with a nice small group during the summer. So, as I promised, here is the newly revised Great Eight list:

1. Medical Terminology. Thankfully, there are no prerequisites for this class. And it's offered on-line! ENROLLED FALL 2011 (on-line class).
   
2. Abnormal Psychology. COMPLETED SUMMER 2011. GRADE: A!!
   
3. Lifespan. This class is about human development from birth to death. ENROLLED FALL 2011.
4. Social Science Statistics. This class is about understanding the math used in scientific research studies so you can tell if a study is bogus or believable. Could come in very handy. If I take this class at BCU, Intro to Psych is the only prerequisite.
   

Those are the four non-science courses. The other four courses are considered the "science core."

1. Human Anatomy with Lab. At last, my chance to cut up dead people! And don't forget the opportunity to smell like formaldehyde. I must have a 200-level biology class with lab before I can take this class. I think I read somewhere that one should take anatomy before one takes physiology.
2. Physiology with Lab. No cutting up dead people here. I'm not sure about the smelling like formaldehyde part. The 200-level bio class is also required as a prereq for this class.
3. Pathology. This class is all about disease and things that can go wrong in body and mind. You can't take this class until you've taken physiology. (Which sorta makes sense, since you should have an understanding of how things function normally before you can really appreciate what constitutes abnormal/pathological function.)
4. Neuroscience with Lab. This class should be called Zombie Class, because it's all about braaaaaiiiins. Specifically, it's about the structure and function of the central and peripheral nervous system, which of course includes the braaaaiiiin.

One down, seven to go!!

A quick update

It has been a busy week. My second Abnormal Psych exam was Monday the 11th, so I spent the whole weekend beforehand studying. The exam seemed pretty easy--on one of the fill-in-the-blank questions, the prof even gave us the first letter of the answer, which I thought was extremely generous (and unnecessary for anyone who actually bothered to study).

Tuesday I went shadowing, but I was only able to observe one client. The OTs have to get permission from their clients before they can bring me along, and understandably, not everyone wants to have an extra person cataloging their vulnerabilities. And you definitely don't want to have someone observing the first time you meet with a client. Such was the case this week, so I met Kay a little later in the morning outside the building of a client who was okay with the extra eyeballs. The client, Lottie, was a lovely woman in her 80s, laughing at her shortcomings and telling jokes the whole time we were with her. Her main issue was low vision, so Kay was going to work with her on operating the player machine she had gotten from the state library for the blind and physically disabled. Unfortunately, we couldn't find the little discs to go in the machine. Lottie is careful not to move things around because she knows she will have trouble finding them again, and she was sure they were on the table, but we couldn't turn them up. After a phone call or two, Kay discovered Lottie's daughter had sent them back, thinking they were overdue! Oops. So we worked on other things instead, including climate control. I never realized this before, but do you know how hard it is to adjust a thermostat when you have a severe vision impairment? Lottie has a digital thermostat with a simple slider for warmer/cooler, but she never uses it because she can't read the temperature on the digital display. It's way, way too small! When the weather gets hot, as it did this week, it's a major concern if your client is just leaving the window open because she can't use her thermostat to set the air conditioning. (Whatever happened to Universal Design??) So it was a short 1 hour and 15 minutes this week, bringing my total observation time to 8 hours and 30 minutes.

We got our Abnormal Psych exams back on Friday, and guess who got ANOTHER perfect score? Yup. There were five perfect scores, so the exam really was easy peasy, but this puts me in great shape for exam #3. As long as I don't completely bomb it, I should be able to start filling in my prereq sheet with a big fat A.

Abnormal Psych: 1 Exam Down, 2 to Go

So the prof walks in on Friday and says, "I have your exams graded." Most of the students look stiffly away or down at their feet, like he just said, "I have your AIDS test results back!"

"I guess I made this test a little harder than I should have," he continues, and I blink. What? I studied for a 10, and his exam was a 3. Totally un-sneaky, straightforward questions covering exactly what he said he was going to cover. We had an hour to finish, and I was done in 20 minutes. Maybe there were backs to the pages and I didn't see the questions on them, so I only did half the test? Christ, that would be just the kind of boneheaded thing I would do!

"The grades were really kind of all over the place," he says apologetically, like it's his fault, "so I did curve the exam."

Uh-oh. If he had to curve it, we didn't do very well. Maybe he nailed me on my short essay. I knew I shouldn't have said the therapist was implanting false memories!

He stands at the front of the room holding a big stack of papers. "OK, I'll hand these back now. Add fifteen points to the score marked on your paper."

"FIFTEEN points?!" I blurt out. "That means we sucked!" Panic mode!

"Well, no, actually two people aced it," he says, looking directly at me, and I immediately feel better. My money is on me and the ex-cop. He and I studied together for two and a half hours the day before the exam, and we eventually got to the point where we couldn't stump each other any more no matter how hard we tried.

"You might be wondering if your score is capped at 100 with the curve," he continues, looking back at the class, "and the answer is no. So if the curve puts you over 100 points, just think of it as getting a little ahead on your next exam." Boy, that would be sweet to get a 105 or 107 or something like that.

I finally get my paper back and glance hastily at the top of the first page. It's the only red ink on the entire exam: one word, underlined twice. It says perfect!

That means I got a 115 on my first exam.

There are not enough smilies on the Internet to express my delight.

First Exam Looming...

I've been so quiet because my first Abnormal Psych exam is today. It is worth 30% of my total grade. Once it is over, I have several nifty things to tell you about!

Why Freud is a Quack

According to my professor:

You bring 50 ten year-old boys into a room, and Freud says, "Okay. My theories say that they should all feel erotic desire for their mothers. For every one that admits that, I get a point. And for each boy who denies having such urges, I say he is experiencing repression. Score another point for me. Lookee, I score 50 points! I win!!"

A theory that claims to explain everything actually explains nothing at all.

All I can add is AMEN.

Everyone Has a Story

The guy to my left was overseas killing people for the military. He was concerned that he wasn't particularly broken up about it. The guy to my right was a big-city cop until he was severely injured on duty and took early retirement. The prof readily admitted to suffering from PTSD.

If everyone else in my Abnormal Psych class is that interesting, it's going to be one heckuva ride.

After the syllabus/policy housekeeping song and dance that I have given any number of times, we talked about abnormality and how problematic it is to define. The DSM-IV-TR has this incredibly long, totally useless definition that reads like the guy at the end of the car commercials murmuring a mile a minute about lease terms and payments.

There are four major components that can render a behavior abnormal. Unfortunately, for each criterion, it's pretty easy to come up with examples of things that meet that particular criterion, but are not pathological. Likewise, there are plenty of abnormalities that do not meet at least some of the criteria.

First, there's deviance: behavior, emotion, or thought that deviates from established behavior and norms. This one's super-easy: go to India and loudly proclaim the miracle of the Immaculate Conception. They will think you are deviant, all right. Or talk to the Ice Breakers, those people that go swimming in icy waters every winter. Deviant? Yes. Abnormal in the abnormal psych sense? No. Also, deviance is always relative to a particular culture and time--it would have been quite odd for me to be taking college classes a century ago as a woman.

Next, bring on distress: the behavior, emotion, or thought is unpleasant or upsetting to the sufferer. Seems clear enough. However, people who suffer from mania are clearly experiencing abnormal behavior despite the complete absence of distress involved. And the guy who's convinced he's Jesus Christ is probably happy as a clam.

Third, we have dysfunction: the ailment makes it difficult for people to care for themselves, maintain social contacts, and hold down a job. Again, a counterexample: people going on hunger strikes to achieve better conditions are dysfunctional in the sense that they are not meeting their basic needs, but this is not abnormal behavior in the clinical sense of the word.
So feel free to get your Gandhi on.

Finally, there is danger: the ultimate in psychological dysfunctioning is behavior that is dangerous to oneself or others. Clearly, the alcoholic who drives around drunk all the time fits the bill, but most people with mental health problems are not dangerous at all.

So, in conclusion, people continue to argue about what "abnormality" actually is. There's more gray here than in the skies over Cleveland in February.

The Waiting Game

Sorry I haven't been posting, but in all honesty, not much is happening. My first day of class continues to draw closer. I think I've finished The Out-of-Sync Child (guess I could do some posts about that), and I continue to read my Abnormal Psych textbook. I've been skipping around a lot rather than reading it straight through, but it is actually a very enjoyable read. I really like how they use news events to further discussion of a certain point. For example, in the chapter about models of abnormality, they took the Binti Jua case and noted how clinical theorists interpreted her actions differently depending on their preferred theory. Well played, Psych book, well played.