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.