Teach of You

  INTRODUCTION Why do people do horrible things? Slave owners and Nazis, any of the perpetrators of history's atrocities, how did they so successfully dehumanize other people for so long? At a smaller scale, how do bullies in the lunchroom manage to treat other kids with such cruelty and then go home and pet their dog and call their grandma and say happy birthday? Most of what we've been studying so far has focused on the individual. We've covered sub-fields of psychology like cognitive, personality, and clinical psychology, which tend to address the phenomena contained within a single person's mind. But there's also social psychology, which focuses on the power of the situation. It examines how we think about, influence, and relate to one another in certain conditions, and it's better equipped to answer this question about people doing horrible things.  Social psychology can not only give us some of the tools we need to understand why people behave brutally, it...

  Does psychotherapy Work? If you saw our last lesson on psychotherapy, you might be wondering, what happened to Bernice? Has she found a way to manage her depression? Is she still wracked with anxiety? Well, it's really nice of you to ask, and I'll tell her you said hi. But for our purposes, as students of psychology, the bigger question arising from Bernice's case is, has psychotherapy helped? And just as important, How can we tell? Well, believe it or not, one of the main ways experts use is to simply ask the client and see how they say they're doing. Is Bernice out of bed and living her life? Did she make it through midterms without spiraling into a crisis? And did she take that plane trip to Baja to party with her girls?  As a clinician, that would all be useful to know, right? But the key is that we want to ask these questions in a scientifically rigorous manner so that we really know what treatment works. rather than just extrapolating from individual cases. And ...

  Types of   Psychotherapy Bernice has issues. And sure, we all do. But hers are getting out of hand. At times, she goes through bouts of depression that make it hard for her to even get out of bed. Sometimes, she suffers from serious anxiety around things like test-taking, flying, and lots of things, all of which are brutalizing her self-worth and affecting her performance in work and life. She's ready to get professional help. Lucky for Bernice, she has a lot of options. Psychotherapy, perhaps the predominant type of psychological treatment involves a therapist using a range of techniques to help a patient overcome troubles, gain insight, and achieve personal growth. Now, you know by now that there are all kinds of perspectives on the human mind and lots of different philosophies on how to approach it.  So it may not come as a surprise that there's also a variety of ways that experts analyze and treat ailments of the mind. They each create their own kind of experie...

  INTRODUCTION: I can be smooth charming and slick. I can make a very confident impression and it's hard to put me at a loss for words. Sometimes I find myself fantasizing about unlimited success power and beauty. I have repeatedly used deceit to cheat, con, or defraud others for my personal gain. To be honest, I don't have much concern for the feelings of other people or their suffering. Doesn't sound like the Hank you know, does it? These are all statements from a self-assessment measure for personality disorders that let patients describe themselves, ranking each statement in terms of how accurate they think it is. To be honest, you can't really rely too much on this kind of self-reporting to assess what we're talking about today, because while some people who are overconfident or obsessed with power or downright deceitful might tell you that they are, there's a certain subset that won't. Many of the disorders we've talked about so far are considered ...

INTRODUCTION: Eating Disorder  When Lauren was 15 years old, her family moved across the country and she started going to a new school. Already shy, Lauren suffered from low self-confidence and had a hard time transitioning. Nothing felt right, and soon her changing body became a source of insecurity. Eventually, she began thinking that maybe if she lost weight and focused on fitness, She'd make more friends and feel better about herself and life would get better. Soon she became obsessed with dieting and it quickly spiraled into her subsisting only on rice cakes apples candy corn and celery. She liked this new feeling of control every time she stood on the scale and saw a lower number. She was achieving something and that made her feel good. Soon she thought of nothing else.  But what Lauren couldn't see was that she was no longer healthy. Even when her hair started falling out her skin grew dry and cracked, and when she could never get warm. When she looked in the mirror, sh...

  INTRODUCTION Schizophrenia and Dissociative Disorders  It's perhaps the most stigmatized and misunderstood psychological disorder of them all, even among psychologists. Maybe because it's pretty rare, affecting about 1% of the population, schizophrenia causes more anxiety in the media, in the public, and even in doctors' offices than any other mental illness. As a result, its sufferers have often been shunned, abused, or locked up. And among the many fallacies that surround the disorder is simply what it means. The word schizophrenia literally means split mind, but contrary to popular belief, the condition has nothing to do with a split in personality or multiple personalities. The term refers instead to what's sometimes called a split from reality. Multiple personality disorder, now known as dissociative identity disorder, is a totally different type of condition, a kind of dissociative disorder.  These two are shrouded in misconceptions, partly because they were ...

 ,  J.R.R. Tolkien. Alright, so you might have read The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings. You've probably seen them. You've definitely heard of them. But not everyone knows the story of their author, J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien was an English World War I veteran, a reluctant soldier. He joined up with a sense of duty, and he lived through the bloody Battle of Somme, suffering tremendous shock, guilt, and loss during and after the war. It took Tolkien years to process his experiences. To help him do it, He turned to writing fiction, and in time, he constructed a world that helped him and all of us better understand war, human nature, loss, and growth. His novels were the byproduct of trauma, and they're among the more beautiful reminders of how it can affect us.  Most of us will experience some kind of traumatic event in our lives, and most of us will exhibit some kind of stress-related behavior because of it. These symptoms usually fade, but for some, those reactions can linge...

  Bipolar Disorder American psychologist and professor of psychiatry Kay Redfield Jamison is one of the world's foremost authorities on bipolar disorder. She's spent her career researching, lecturing, and writing seminal books on the condition, a condition that she also happens to have had her entire adult life. In her memoir, An Unquiet Mind, Jamison details what it really means to be bipolar. She writes of not sleeping for days on end, of feeling long periods of euphoria, and filling whole notebooks with her racing thoughts and grandiose While in these manic states, she experienced a tremendously inflated sense of self-esteem and did impulsive things that felt good at the time but had painful consequences, like going on lavish shopping sprees, engaging in promiscuous behavior, racking up credit card debt, and emptying her bank accounts.  Mood Disorder But these episodes were followed by emotional crashes. crippling bouts of depression that sent her into a suicidal spiral. At...