Saturday, May 07, 2005

Insanity

I’m actually intrigued by the stuff I’m reading and revising now.

Just like how I’m intrigued by the many novels, plays, films and television programs exploring what many people see as the dark side of human nature. I’m sure you’ve read one of the many self-help books that flood the market.

This fascinating field is known as Abnormal Psychology.

Psychology can only become abnormal when a norm exists. People then deviate from this norm and culture. For instance, 10% of people believe they have seen a ghost (ghosts don’t drop by, if they do exist); 23% confess to not flushing the toilet all the time (flushing toilets is a social conduct); 39% confess to snooping in their hosts’ medicine cabinets (checking out friends’ medicines is deemed undesirable and sick)…

Psychology can also become abnormal when people develop mental dysfunctions. James Bond said in “Tomorrow Never Dies”, “The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success.” Albert Einstein commented that insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

So, let’s face it: nobody in this world is normal, including you and me.

Everybody has some mental disorders at some juncture in their lives, and it occurs in varying degrees. From obsessive compulsive behaviour like biting your fingernails or checking several times repeatedly that you’ve locked your door after leaving your apartment, to fears of spiders and heights and even sexual intercourse… from getting anxious when taking an exam that we are not confident in, to developing auditory hallucinations and persecutory delusions. All these behaviours are deemed to be not normal.

Ok… It’s kind of practical to study these in many ways. It’s sort of cool as well to study such topics as stress and anxiety when I’m actually feeling stressful and anxious. So most of the time, I’m actually evaluating myself… oh I seem to have this symptom as well, and that as well, does that mean I can be diagnosed with GAD? I’m getting severely depressed because that happened, I should engage in cognitive-behaviour therapy and maybe ingest some SSRIs or MAOIs so as to alleviate my depressive symptoms. I accidentally got a deep cut, and it’s damn painful, but hey, I can divert my attention to somewhere else, and this will close the gate hypothesised to be in the spinal cord, to prevent pain signals transmitted in the C-fibres from reaching the cerebral cortex, according to Melzack and Wall’s (1965) gate control theory...

Perhaps, the reason we get insane is because insanity is the only perfectly adjustment to an insane world.

~~~~~

*Damn it… There were a few surprises in the exam yesterday… Depression, which appeared every year, did not come out yesterday. The most common psychological disorder with 1 in 6 people possessing depression at some time in their lives, and my lecturers decided to surprise us. What the hell… But the getaway to Oxford was fantastic, and Mary Poppins on last Tuesday compensated for everything else. :)

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