Today in class, I learned about many different disorders that occur to humans. Tourette Syndrome was among them, and this somehow got me the most attention. Dictionary.com defines TS as:
Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1) - Cite This Source - Share This Tourette’s syndrome
/t??r?ts/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[too-rets] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation –noun Pathology. a neurological disorder characterized by recurrent involuntary movements, including multiple neck jerks and sometimes vocal tics, as grunts, barks, or words, esp. obscenities.
Basically, t
his means that people with TS make frequent jerks or tics that they cannot control. We saw a short film about TS, along with the lesson. Little kids were discussing about their disorder and how it was hard to have a social life because of this disadvantage. Contrast to the severity of their disease, these kids seemed bright and hopeful about their lives. A boy in the film were teaching his kindergarten class about Tourette Syndrome. The way he talked and expressed his thoughts were clear and strong, even better than any average 7 year olds. But our society do judge the book by its cover, and kids with TS has to live with ridicules and weird looks for a large part of their lives.
When I got home, I decided to research more on Tourette Syndrome. I simply googled it and came across Rindy Walton’s blog about TS. She is a mother of three children who are all diagnosed with TS, ADHD, and/or OCD. But instead of feeling downright hopeless, Rindy chose to find more about TS and educate herself. She found out that she carried a gene that was connected with TS.
“One of my goals is to increase awareness by sharing the struggles and modifications we’ve faced. But more importantly, my primary goal is to share how this has shaped who we are today and how a seemingly devastating condition may possibly have some positives. “
Rindy took this ordeal as something to build upon and shape her life with. As she says,
“I think you will see that it’s not about a specific diagnosis and it’s not just about Tourette Syndrome, it’s about how all of us look at and what we do with what life sends our way.”
– Rindy, on Tourette Syndrome–a personal look
This especially rings true for me because I’ve had to deal with depression for quite a while. I can be open about it because, like Rindy, I accepted depression as something to overcome and shape my life with. It was an opportunity where I took different approaches in viewing life. While overcoming this disorder, I became interested in psychology and the human mind—a subject that can possibly be my major in college. I sympathized those who were suffering depression, because I was there and I knew how horrible it felt.
Perhaps I went through this ordeal in order to help others who suffer from these disorders. Perhaps I am one of the many who are destined to help those in need.
Photo credits: {amanda}, tearoom
Technorati Tags: kiswrites, aplit07, tourette, syndrome, depression, psychology
As my high school career comes close to an end, I cannot believe I actually made through it. Starting from a scared little 9th grader to a lazy, doing-nothing senior, I grew and learned a lot from school. Psychologists say that learning in schools actually improve people’s intelligence. I don’t know if that is true, since some people who graduated high school seems less intelligent than a middle schooler. No matter what it is, I am glad that I got to experience the supposed ‘best time of my life’. There were some ups and downs, of course, everyone has that. But I think the most important thing of all in high school is friends. Friends are everything, when we go ‘out in to the world’. They give you a shoulder to lean on, laugh at your non-funny jokes, and like you for who you are. High school made me define who I am and prepared me to make more connections ‘out there’.
ad. But the one thing I will remember is the lunch time talk with my friends, our class’s clown, taking photos of us doing the weirdest pose, the plan to go to Fiji, the serious talks about our deepest secrets…
Psychophysical illness. This is a new vocabulary that I learned in AP Psychology recently. Basically, this is an illness to your body caused by stress. Your body reacts to what the mind says, and when it finds that the mind is stressed, it becomes stressed, too. The tension in your body weakens the immune system, making diseases more likely to enter your body.
particularly well, mood wise. Many things seemed to happen all at once, like a bomb going off unexpectedly. This stressed me out so much to the point where I couldn’t eat breakfast or lunch. With no food in my stomach, I came back home after school feeling dizzy and nauseated. Then I had a momentary blackout, where I knew and felt my eyes wide open but I could not see anything. It was pitch black, and I had to sit down on the floor to prevent running into things. As if a pitch darkness wasn’t enough, I couldn’t breathe like normal. I felt like the air around me was sucked out into a vacuum, as I sat there helplessly gulping for air. After about 15 minutes or so, I began to see my dog sniffing my hands and I was breathing normally.
The textbook explains that the mind and the body are so intertwined to the point where it is nearly indistinguishable. In other words, the body thinks, too. It feels emotions, and it is not just a heap of random cells put together to form a lively functioning miracle.
things. Being vulnerable to the cruel, ruthless life can be quite discomforting. Focusing what we can’t control to things we can is one of humans’ defense mechanisms, commonly sited in psychology textbooks. We tend to focus our energy on something that we can have control over. This can be either our favorite sports, arts, or anything we can create and do ourselves.
one of the biggest rising problem, especially in the United States. When hunger strikes, the odor of fresh baked pie can get to anyone. Unless you have an eating disorder. But that’s a whole another story for another time. But when I win over the desire to eat that savory pie, or any kind of food, I feel a little satisfied. Even though I’m hungry and miserable, I’m satisfied that I could control my hunger, my hands, and my brain for reaching that pie. Of course, there are lots of times which I lose that control and binge on all kinds of food. That’s why restricting food is a BAD way of dieting. Besides that, and when I do have that ability to control my eating and control my weight, I cannot feel any better. And that’s how I cope with my life, metaphorically.
arent relationship is. When we are born, psychologists say that we find our parents by their body odor. And once we get familiar with their body odor, we start our “critical period”– the period where we develop cognitive, moral, and psychosocial developments.
For right now, I have no idea what the answers to my questions are. But I am sure it’s out there somewhere. In my opinion though, these orphaned children have a psychological difference even if they are not aware of it. Humans were designed to touch–it is one of the five senses, after all. By touching, we feel like we belong with someone. By touching, we know we are here. By touching, we know who we love. But orphaned children, children whose parents were careless enough to throw them away, doesn’t know these feelings.
against threats of fragmentation.[
feeling particularly angry today for many different reasons. And I note this not because I want condolence, but because the aggression that I felt was stronger than other days. It felt like as if my heart was filled with hard rocks and I was becoming really dizzy. My voice got high and unmanageably loud, and I couldn’t breathe normally. The strange thing was, I didn’t know what I was angry with. Or even if I did, I didn’t want to admit that I was angry. When I got home, I was curious of what causes anger and where it came from– and above is what I found.
So why was I so angry? At first, I was mad because I was being treated less than what I thought I deserved to be. From friends, from teachers, and from myself, I was getting ridiculed for whatever mistakes that I had made in my life. Of course, I could be overreacting and that’s probably what other people would tell me. But I was angry nonetheless. Everything seemed to be messed up, a cluster of failures. Plus, I was losing myself. I was losing myself, becoming part of the cruel, heartless world, an animal, an automaton who obeyed what the authority told me to do. This seemed to fit along with the analysis of Lacan. And because I was frustrated with the truth, I was becoming more aggressive and angry.
We love to just label people, according to either their ethnicity, physical appearance, culture, etc. We feel safe in our group, and wants to be approved by those around us. I recently learned this in my AP Psychology class. This is where prejudice and stereotype comes in–and where “Us” and “Them” follows. We will always defend what we think is right versus “Them”, whoever the outer group is. Just because we observe a fat person eating cake doesn’t mean that that person loves cake, and that doesn’t mean that the person is lazy. This is called “Fundamental Attribution Error”, where we label others according to one instance we see of the other person.
Extremes. There are many extremes in life, whatever it may be. You can be extremely obsessed with gaming, extremely in love with someone, extremely bored… Whichever it is, I always thought that giving everything and doing things in an extreme ways were a good thing. I mean, who wouldn’t like a girl studying ‘extremely hard’ and getting a top notch grade, a girl who plays sports ‘extremely well’ and have many sports awards? But there’s always extremes like being extremely depressed or being overly obsessed with clean things, or being too superstitious. These extremes are at the ‘bad end’, something that shouldn’t be occupying one’s mind. I had these ‘bad extremes’ all my life–trying to be overly perfect, trying too hard to please someone, having an extreme food restrictions or even eating too much. But out of all these extremes, I found that balancing out extremes–finding the gray point–is the way to be. This might seem a bit obvious, but it’s hard to actually realize it unless you experience it yourself.
