Thoughts of a Psychology Student

So after reading that Introversion has been included in the latest version of the DSM, I felt the need to write a post about it and write out my thoughts on the new term used in psychology: medicalisation. In James Davies new controversial book "Cracked: Why Psychiatry Is Doing More Harm Than Good", it explains that Medicalisation is the process by which more and more of our human characteristics are seen as needing medical explanation and treatment. In essence, it highlights the problem of psychiatry medicalising ordinary reactions and responses. A prime example of this is the issue of Introversion featuring in the DSM. For those of you that don't know, Introversion is a personality type. Online dictionaries define it as "a  person predominantly concerned with their own thoughts and feelings rather than with external things" or "t o concentrate one's interests upon oneself". Immediately however, this gives off a negative impression of int...

Though I haven't posted on here in a while, it has seemed that a topic keeps cropping up in every day happenings so much so that I decided I should write about it. The topic in question is Stories. More precisely, the importance of stories in a literal sense but also as an abstract concept. I suppose this thought process began whilst I was debating whether or not to take a gap year before university. The idea of being able to travel the world in pursuit of so called 'self discovery' has always appealed to me, just as it did to Forster's Lucy Honeychurch and indeed John Green's  Quentin “Q” Jacobsen. But the more I thought about it, the more it  occurred  to me that perhaps this idea of finding out 'who you are' is just an idea found in story books and the first world. For want of a better phrase, self discovery is ultimately a "first world problem". So what does this have to do with stories? Well during a discussion with one of the teache...