Mind You.

MIND YOU. 

Introduction

For my final presentation of Winter Term of 2020, I decided to finish off this term with a project focused around the concept of mental illness and the "evolution" of the awareness and attention that has been changing as we progress further into the future. My guiding question was "How do misconceptions about mental disorders begin to develop?' This idea comes from one of my core classes "Disease," in which we focused on not only bodily illnesses but those that take effect in the mind. I had to make a simulation during one of my action projects that made it a challenge to simulate all the symptoms of our chosen mental disorder. I decided to take a similar approach to through this final presentation by testing the ability of a person to recognize when something is abnormal through a slideshow where I time them to see how quickly they can spot it, whether or not it exists, and then use that as my transitioning.

Simulation

Down below you'll find my simulation to test whether or not the viewer is able to recognize where (and if) the image is abnormal, tested by photoshopping and pulling confusing pictures off the internet.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1TG6t95Akm5f9oUhrXcDA2i8yNU_VBV1pzIXkOxtIR0c/edit?usp=sharing

What is normality? 

Normality is subjective to our experiences, our lifestyles, our culture, our every part of our being. It changes through time and place. Normality is not normal, there is no universal normal. Why bring up this? Because mental disorders have often been labeled as abnormal, a flaw in a being that needs to be "fixed." Are we even able to point out these flaws to deem them this? What you'll see below is my view on the subject and how we should go about addressing it.

Putting numbers into perspective 

I believe that we all have our own sense of what is normality and what isn’t, which is true as we all have our own experiences to go off to recognize what’s appropriate to our minds and what isn’t. We’re able to recognize unique features in our lives and in others more often than we realize. Such as a way somebody walks, or how they structure their wording in a sentence. How well are we able to recognize somebody with a mental disorder though? According to a study done by a Psychiatric University Hospital in Zurich, Switzerland, involving 844 people to collect information from, they tested their ability to recognize somebody with a depressive disorder. Only 39.8% of the people tested were able to correctly recognize the person was suffering a depressive disorder. They not only tested their ability to recognize depression but also Schizophrenia. Schizophrenia has more alarming symptoms in comparison to depression, which was viewed by the people who incorrectly guessed it as just “having a crisis.” When they tested their ability to recognize the symptoms of schizophrenia, the vast majority of them succeeded. 73.6% of the interviewees correctly guessed it. This study was done in 2003, and since then I believe we’ve seen some progression towards acknowledging that mental disorders need more public recognition that is past the idea of just being a minute of one’s life that will eventually change with time. 

We cannot help each other if we cannot recognize our problems. It’s not always easy to recognize what is going on in the minds of others. If you’re wondering why this is significant to do or care about, let me throw some more statistics at you. 16.2 million American adults are estimated to be suffering major depressive disorder. That’s 6.7% of American adults out of the very many in America. Social anxiety gets diagnosed in about an estimated 40 million (or 18.1%)  American adults. Anxiety treatments are highly effective as well, but only 36.9% of those diagnosed actually seek out treatment for it. The majority of us find our own ways to treat ourselves of our problems. The truth being a lot of us are scared to reach out for help of any sort, including me.
Depression runs pretty far back on my mom’s side of the family, and with how I grew up, it’s hard to talk about what I’m thinking all the time. Form the wrong words in a sentence and you scare whoever’s listening off the deeper the conversation gets. It’s a narrow path with a hard fall if you slip, and that’s why some of us take alternative routes to helping ourselves. To compensate for my constantly recurring feeling of being unsuccessful, I play games that reward me with success for my efforts in it. My final presentation does not demand anything out of you, it does not want you to read up on all the mental disorders in the world to make sure you can recognize everything. I only request that when you’re with a friend or family member that you ask them how they’re feeling and if they’re alright, as cliché as it might sound, it really does let whoever you’re asking know that you care about their wellbeing.

Self-Help

If you cannot help others because you can't help yourself, there are ways to inform yourself about what's going on in your mind through well written books, like for depression there is a book (with a fairly long title) that goes into detail about what cognitive-behavioural therapy is and how to apply it to yourself, along with dealing and understanding depression. There's even a book my mom ended up giving me (that I didn't bother to read because I'm lazy when it comes to reading in my free time). It is called "Outsmarting Worry," which deals with anxiety within older kids. It is written by Dawn Huebner, who has a PhD as a clinical psychologist. Finding out what's wrong first is key to starting on the right foot. If you can't find what you're looking for through Google, try looking through the DSM-V, which is a documentary that entirely is focused on collecting information on quite literally every mental disorder, listing its symptoms, behaviors, and a lot more. If you really want to be that person that knows every mental disorder, this is where you want to start. 

Citations

https://adaa.org/about-adaa/press-room/facts-statistics

https://www.healthline.com/health/depression/facts-statistics-infographic

We Angry Few

We Angry Few

Introduction

             Ever heard of Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder? It's a mouthful and it isn't exactly something that has drawn the attention of the media. In our class "Disease," we looked at mental disorders and people diagnosed with certain types of mental disorders. We took a long look at disorders like OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder), Autism Spectrum Disorder, and Schizophrenia, one of our sources being the DSM-5. In our deep dive into these disorders, we also looked at the brain itself. We learned about brain waves inside the mind, specifically five of them, those five being: Delta, Theta, Alpha, Beta, and Gamma. Those are the different levels of brain activity inside your mind, all based on exactly what you're doing. Your brain itself does not stay just on one specific brainwave, as different parts of your brain can either be relaxed while others are overworked. This is where we learned that we could apply math to measuring brainwaves. Brainwaves scale up and down, so it's difficult to make an equation for it. This is where piecewise function comes in, another thing we learned while looking at disorders. This is a certain type of math that allows you to separate points on a graph into different sections and create functions as if they were just a singular line on the graph. I'll be showing you how I applied this to my study of DMDD (Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder) through a recording of a simulation lesson plan that I had created to present the symptoms in a more lively form, my study itself (brainwaves and symptoms), and the mathematical bit as well.

DMDD

To explain exactly what DMDD is, I'll tell you its symptoms and the part of the brain that is affected by it. DMDD itself is mainly found in children nearing their pre-teen years. More than likely you would often view any child that has DMDD as "moody." Parents describe their diagnosed children to be troublesome in the sense that it is hard to depict or understand where exactly their triggers are. Those with DMDD will feel aggravated, annoyed, uncomfortable, anxious, and paranoid. They share many similar symptoms with those diagnosed with ADHD and some on the Autism Spectrum Disorder. They deal with severe temper outbursts, often causing self-harm, harm to others, or to other things. Anybody untreated for DMDD unable to find a person or a thing to harm will often harm themselves, so there is a safety risk for the untreated diagnosed. The part of the brain that is mostly known to cause DMDD is the amygdala. It is the part of the brain connected to two emotions/feelings, primarily being anger and fear. One parent with a diagnosed child had found that handling her child's trigger was like "walking on eggshells." I pulled information from a documentary of a 9 year old child that was diagnosed with DMDD, they described in detail what kind of treatments were used on her to help handle the symptoms individually.
Referring back to what was said before about DMDD sharing symptoms with ADHD and the Autism Spectrum,  an interesting thing that I discovered was that how they (they, being the doctors that work towards a treatment for it) try to treat new disorders is the same way they work with creating vaccines. To treat DMDD, they pull different types of therapy from other disorders that have shown effectiveness treating certain symptoms. They analyze it piece-by-piece rather than trying to get into the mind of somebody with DMDD. One of the treatments was cognitive-behaviour treatment (CBT), which is commonly done on those with ADHD.

Simulation

To show how I decided to approach simulating these symptoms and after a very lengthy read that may or may not have set your mind into alpha or delta,  here is a recording of my lesson plan (that I had executed slightly unprepared to be honest only really in the informing part, but for somebody without any slideshow or paper to read off of, I think my memory worked out really well). Enjoy and ignore any rude gestures I may have accidentally made (I don't know why I couldn't figure out the motor functions for my hand that day still).
https://youtu.be/1xN1gJ28yrY

Brainwaves

Something I failed to explain and show in my presentation was the brainwaves I had intended to simulate. For the first minute of my presentation, I had intended to simulate Alpha brainwaves amongst my peers, as my brief explanation of what my disorder was not the most attention-demanding thing in the world. Once I initiated the test, I expected for them to go up from Alpha to Beta brainwaves. Of course, not everybody cared about this test, some had even given up midway. This kind of stimulation was intended to last the entire test, about 2 minutes, a little over because I forgot that the test had a time limit. Transitioning from that would be a continuation of brainwave Beta. I have a discussion between everybody to make sure that they experienced the symptoms I addressed, see how they were able to tackle the test. To my hopes, I exceeded in simulating all of the symptoms. This discussion lasted two minutes. The rest of the time was spent explaining my disorder to the best of my ability off the top of my head, and with a little check in on my computer. I expected my talk about DMDD to be somewhere in the Beta range, a little in between both Alpha and Beta, but if I had to choose I'd say Beta in this video. 

To explain the vocabulary from the bottom to the top, these are the different terms we use for different levels of brain activity:

Delta - "Dreamless Sleep" - A state of mind that is essentially your recharging state. 

Theta - "Deep meditation" - A state of mind that is your gateway to learning, memory, and intuition.
Alpha - "Present mind" - A state of mind that is the resting state of the brain, overall your relaxed or "chill" moments, doing things that don't require much effort.
Beta - "Alert" - A state of mind that is your problem-solving wavelengths, doing challenging math problems or engaging in class activities are Beta.
Gamma - " ? " - A state of mind more unknown to us, it is commonly reached when experiencing a moment of love for humanity, highly emotional.

Lastly, before ending this project off, we were challenged to make a poster that gives thorough information on our disorder. Made with the intention to target parents, this is my poster.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1FY60efPnN8zEB4fnERrUwnT4VZGHog8AzxsImqSIboc/edit?usp=sharing

Thank you for reading.

Banned In A Bloody Bubble Bath

Banned In A Bloody Bubble Bath

Provoked by the title? Get ready a long read if you plan on staying then. In my Humanities course, Forbidden Books, we took a look at banned books, analyzed them thoroughly together and pulled apart why somebody would want books banned. You may or may not have seen my other action project on this book, but this action project that I've written is solely to defend my book of choice Fight Club, by Chuck Palahniuk, specifically why I deem it unjust to ban such a book. Through research and dedication, this paper was produced. Enjoy the read.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1WsP0MkxMA4_y5tcUr3SmX2mWvMjDX6IThWc1cCP94ks/edit?usp=sharing