Author: Lizabeth Miller

Recognizing Mood Disorders

Throughout my life, I’ve known many people with mood disorders. One of my best friends today has been diagnosed including General Anxiety Disorder (GAD) and Bipolar Disorder. 

Anxiety is essentially a feeling of unrealistic or excessive fearfulness. Often times, people get anxiety about the future or current stimuli they’re experiencing. However, in the case of GAD, the anxiety often comes out of nowhere; you’re not able to recognize where the worry is coming from. In order to be diagnosed with GAD, you have to have uncontrollable and persistent anxiety for at least six months. Anxiety can also present itself in other disorders, like panic disorders. This is where someone might experience a panic attack, a minutes-long espisode of dread that can be accompanied by physical symptoms, like chest pain. 

I’ve watched her struggle with the constant anxiety, and it can get very exhausting for her. For example, we could be in the car going somewhere, but she suddenly gets too anxious to continue to our destination. 

Bipolar Disorder is when a person’s mood will switch between extreme lows and extreme highs. This is formerly called manic-depressive disorder, and it can often be attributed to genetics. In the case of my friend, her mother also has bipolar disorder. My friend will often be very energetic and spontaneous during her “manic” stages and very uninterested and slow in her down stages. 

I’ve found that being supportive of friends with mental illness is incredibly important. It helps to not act like you know or understand everything they’re going through, but rather allow them to tell you about their own experiences. It’s important to be knowledgeable about mental health, so that you have a very general idea of what someone might be going through, and can therefore support someone through what could potentially be a time of hardship. 

 

Blog Post 2: Early Child Development

There’s an unspoken rule in my family: if you’re doing something that makes a baby laugh, you absolutely can not stop until the baby is tired of it. 

One of the things that usually got babies laughing or smiling was playing the classic game, “peek-a-boo.” Everyone knows it: you put your hands over your face and then quickly remove them, saying “Peek-a-boo!” usually to the delight of the baby. 

In the last week, we learned that this is because babies don’t yet understand object permanence. This means that when they can’t immediately see something, babies think that the object literally doesn’t exist anymore. That would explain why they’re so happy to see your face after you move your hands. 

Though I’m the youngest child in my immediate family, I get to watch my niece grow up. She’s only three, but many of the concepts and developmental stages we’ve discussed in class are certainly relevant. 

For example, I saw her go through Piaget’s theory of the sensorimotor stage. Part of this stage is that the child will take in the world through their senses. When my niece first started to get curious about things, I got to watch her interact with the world around her. Mainly, she liked to put things in her mouth. Of course, she also looked at and touched everything she could. 

Another part of the sensorimotor stage is the previously mentioned concept of object permanence, which a child develops around one year old. I remember when my niece first started to realize that when you hid something from her, it hadn’t completely vanished. While this made it harder to protect TV remotes, it was also a really exciting development to watch. 

After the sensorimotor stage is the preoperational stage, which kids will stay in until they’re around six or seven years old. In this stage, a child will start to learn the language, but won’t really understand logic. They also lack the concept of conservation, the idea that quantity remains the same despite a change in shape. 

In class, we watched the video of young kids thinking tall glasses had more water than a shorter glass, despite watching the same amount be poured into each. This is the stage my niece is currently in. She started to talk a little after she turned two years old, and she can hold a fairly steady conversation now (when she feels like it, anyway). 

While she still has a long way to go, it’s been super interesting to watch my niece grow up and develop skills that make her a little more of a functional human. I’m especially excited about the concrete operational stage when she starts to be able to comprehend logic and can hold more complex conversations.

 

Blog Post 1: Peripheral Nervous System

A few summers ago, I started to get more into psychological thrillers and horror movies, despite the fact that I’ve always been very easily scared. Still, something about these types of movies is so interesting to me, so I began to see them in theaters. 

I remember seeing a few that were kind of unnerving, like Split and Get Out, but none that really got me. It was when I saw the movie, The Quiet Place, that I was really caught off guard by the suspense and the action. So much so, that I experienced physical symptoms during the movie— and even after.

This connects to the nervous system, specifically the sympathetic nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system is what controls many of your “fight or flight” responses. It causes involuntary reactions to “arousing” events by doing things like quickening your heart rate or dilating your pupils. 

In my case, with the movie, my heart rate picked up and my teeth chattered completely involuntarily. The scary movie put me on edge, and my sympathetic nervous system responded by triggering these physical symptoms. 

The counterpart of the sympathetic nervous system is the parasympathetic nervous system, which also triggers involuntary changes in your body, but in more of a calm way. For example, when the movie ended and my boyfriend squeezed my hand, signaling to me that everything is okay and that it was just a movie, my heart rate started to slow without me purposefully telling it to. I felt more at ease. 

Both the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems are part of a greater nervous system: the Autonomic branch of the Peripheral Nervous System. The autonomic branch is what controls the involuntary, automatic actions that outside triggers may cause. This is different than the Somatic branch of the Peripheral nervous system, which is responsible for voluntary movements, like picking up a pencil. 

I experienced the Somatic side of things when I covered my eyes with my hands during the movie or turned my head away. 

While it’s reassuring to know that the sometimes overwhelming reactions my body has are perfectly logical, it’s safe to say that I probably won’t be watching a scary movie any time soon.