Confidence Intervals

Ibuprofen reduces inflammation, fevers, and pain. Anti-depressants relieve symptoms of depression. Lithium stabilizes manic symptoms back to baseline. Statements like these are easy to make. Often, they are  made, without a forethought about the implications. Most of the time, statements like these are true. But the sucky thing about humanity is that we can't say, with absolute certainty, that these things are always  true. They're not fact. Enough research and evidence has pretty well convinced us that we can make statements like these with at least a little bit of confidence, but humans are so vast, and so imperfect, that sometimes ibuprofen doesn't do what we've been told it does. Sometimes anti-depressants don't relieve as many of the symptoms of depression as we want, or think it should . Lithium works as well as the dosage and the person's physiology match up. Moral of the story: science is only as strong as the research that supports it.  Whe...

Fun Fact: Grad school is very expensive. Another fun fact: There is absolutely no way of knowing what you're going to find when you stick 26 people in close proximity to each other when they were originally oblivious to each other's existence. When I moved to a new state for grad school, I had no idea what I was going to find. I was going into the wilderness with all of my belongings, and hoping against hope - and my anxiety - that I would land somewhere and be able to call it home. I was in a new place, with new people, and very unfamiliar personalities. I arrived, having quit my job willfully to pursue higher education. It was insane! For the first time, I was around 25 other people who loved psychology as much as me! 25 other people that could geek out as much as I did about learning how to administer an intelligence test. 25 other people that cared about what diagnostic criteria went into giving someone a diagnosis - but only if it was warranted. 25 other people who ...

I just realized I blasted through the last post. My b. I should probably introduce myself. I'm Shawn. I'm a first year doctoral student in Clinical Psychology. I love helping people figure life out, and feel okay doing it. It's why I decided to go into this field. It's also why I'm starting this blog. I wanted to do a YouTube channel, but I can't make sense of that, so here we are! Good, old fashioned (digital) print! I want to use this blog to help make psychology less mysterious to people I interact with on the interwebs. I also want to help clear up some confusion people experience with the rumors and misunderstandings people hear about psychologists and what we do. Today's topic is about what psychology isn't.  It isn't  a lot of things, but I'm mostly going to stick with some of the things I hear most often. When I tell someone what I'm studying, I invariably hear a lot of the following: "Oh no! He's going to analyze me!...