Confidence Intervals

**Disclaimer: I have been writing blog posts for the training clinic I am interning with, and some of the posts for that site are posted here. **The following post is not  one of those. This is my independent set of opinions, and do not necessarily reflect those of the Psychological Services Center.** To be white in this country comes with great privilege. We don't see it because it acts like a little bubble, protecting us from the horrors others experience. Our world isn't filled with experiences of prejudice, discrimination, or racism (obviously there are other situations where this isn't true, like with the case of the LGBTQ+ and disabled population, but that's not what I'm getting at). Our understanding of another's experience is greatly influenced by the way we've experienced life, and we don't like facing it. It's uncomfortable. Especially in this day and age, when this country seems so progressive, and so culturally sophisticated, for som...

They say that the key to a good relationship is communication. I don’t know who “they” are supposed to be, but they’ve been saying it for years on end, so I’m inclined to believe them. Luckily, science agrees with them. There’s a lot you can do with a relationship if you’re able to communicate well with someone, and a lot of issues in a relationship can be traced back to miscommunications or misunderstandings. Knowing how to work through communication issues to be clear and gracious toward each other can go a long way to making life – even life after this pandemic – survivable. Here are some strategies for communicating better with your loved ones – whether they are your significant other or not! If you want a TL;DR of this, scroll to the end for a poster one of my fellow clinicians put together that lays it all out nice and pretty-like. Communication Rules You probably don’t realize it, but there are often unspoken rules to how your conversations go, and if these rules are b...

It’s no secret that what’s happening these days is tough on everyone. The limits of the human experience are being challenged in ways we never imagined would happen to us. In some instances, you hear whispers that we weren’t prepared for this. And yet... You hear stories of resilience. Videos on social media have gone viral, of people singing from their balconies , exercise instructors getting people to exercise from their balconies , people dancing with each other at a socially-respectable distance , and visiting loved ones through glass or the other side of a balcony to close the gap on the lack of social contact people have been getting these days. Then there are the virtual interactions, with the choirs and orchestras coming together to perform masterfully edited numbers that include hymns , Disney covers , and show tunes . There have also been the music artists who have done virtual concerts and the movie actors who have been collaborating to provide some measu...

Motivation. It’s not really the word you want to think about when you’re staring at your home/work assignment and longing for Animal Crossing, Halo, or Cookie Clicker (please not Cookie Clicker...the chocolatey chipey black hole of soo many misplaced hours!). You know you should do the thing, but even washing your house sounds more appealing than the thing you need to do. Another casualty of COVID-19...our motivation. It feels weird, because it’s not like we’re too busy to get the sleep we need, and really, the amount of assignments to complete hasn’t increased that much, if at all. So how does it make sense that every thirty seconds finds a new excuse for a distraction that will make us feel better than the effort of a job completed? Perhaps it’s because we feel helpless? This isn’t going to apply to everyone, but for some people, there can be a sense of helplessness in the middle of this pandemic. We’re told we can’t go to work unless we’re essential, and if ...

This is the first post in a series that I am doing for the Psychological Services Center, located at Regent University, a department/school mental health clinic that serves the student population of Regent University and the surrounding community. With so much of the world in a constant state of unknown, and most of the world being confined to their houses for the last month, many are seeing their mental health affected. At times, people can get confused about why their mental health is affected. “I’m just stuck in my house, it’s not like anything is really happening to me.” And yet, there are a lot of reports of a lack of motivation, concentration, and energy. Declarations of newfound productivity are played out on the couch in front of Netflix and a bag of Cheetos. Marriages have been feeling tense, and the joys of parenting are starting to look more like struggles. Fears about being infected with a new strain of a disease we don’t know much about are fighting for attention ...

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 ...