Comments | niki_chan: First-year Psychology - What Mental Disorder Are You?

niki_chan

First-year Psychology - What Mental Disorder Are You?

Mar 31, 2003 04:41

Just by sheer coincidence while reading the age online, I stumbled upon a thing called delayed sleep phase syndrome. It's a syndrome, mostly genetic (seems to run in families) where people find it hard to go to sleep before about 2am and generally wake up in the late morning or early afternoon. It's distinct from insomnia in that people who have ( Read more... )

Comments 8

ex_delve955 March 30 2003, 12:23:22 UTC

Ah, the familiar perils of abstraction!* the part I love is "marked, persistent identity disturbance in at least 2 of self-image, sexual orientation, career choice or other long-term goals, friendships, or values".

So, basically, you may display symptoms of BPD if you're not certain about your sex-orientation, happy with your job, angry with your friends, have a tendency towards change .... of *any* kind, oh, and if you're unhappy with your image, fuggetaboutit. No wonder it got booted; it probably fit 50%+1 of the population, making it technically sane. The psychology papers I want to read are the ones which go into why certain words are used as psychological terms at all - who decided that happiness evolved from abstraction to actuality?

* A line I owe DJ for.

niki_chan March 30 2003, 22:26:17 UTC

I should have mentioned, you have to fill all (or at least a certain proportion, I can't remember what) of those criteria. If you have only a couple, it means nothing. In the same way that a person who has mood swings isn't necessarily bipolar. Psychology is a discipline all too well acquainted with DJ's familiar perils; in fact you might say it's all we have. But unlike most abstract disciplines, we have to find a way to put it into practice.

The thing about mental disorders - if you talk about them in theory, they're so much hot air; but if you meet a person who actually has one, you know. And you think, "There's gotta be a name for what's up with this guy." Most mental disorders start in normality and go along a continuum to wacked and crazy, with all the shades in between. Calling someone mentally ill is a matter of drawing a line and saying "You are well past that line and no one is gonna argue about it".

paracelsus March 31 2003, 13:32:15 UTC

I went to a shrink as a kid. All I remember was being bored out of my mind. And although I can't really shake the suspicion that science at least meets these newfangled 'syndromes' halfway in terms of cause and effect, your last paragraph there clarified some stuff for me.

There's some mileage on my side of the academy in lionising mental disorder as some kind of overcoming of societal norms, largely due to bad readings of Foucault, but that attitude doesn't hold up in the face of real cases, does it? Not everyone who's mentally imbalanced is an Artaud or a Nietzsche.

Maybe you should think about continuing psych studies... I think you'd be much better than that woman I saw, and if you can peer past the welter of statistics, it's pretty interesting stuff.

madigrrl March 30 2003, 15:42:16 UTC

Wow - I hit every one of them - sign me up!

unsworn_nomore March 30 2003, 18:02:18 UTC

niki_chan March 30 2003, 22:34:29 UTC

Actually, the human body clock's natural rate is 25 hours, not 24. It's just that the sun usually overrides our urge to wake up every 25 hours. I guess if your relationship with the sun isn't one of regularity, you might revert to the natural 25 hour cycle.

Actually, that was one of the arguments to suggest that human life began on Mars :)

unsworn_nomore March 31 2003, 20:32:45 UTC

I guess if your relationship with the sun isn't one of regularity, you might revert to the natural 25 hour cycle.

My relationship with the Sun, as you suggest, is no different from any other relationships of mine.

tomble March 30 2003, 22:20:05 UTC

Hmm, I generally find that if left to my own devices, with no work schedule, my routine quickly turns to one of :

Bed time = 3 am
Wake up = 10:30 - 11:00 am

I normally don't feel like going to bed when I do, but I know I must, or suffer the consequences when the time comes to wake up.