I had waited all semester to learn about psychological disorders and was finally met with that desire last week. We finally started talking about mental health disorders, and I am very happy to do so because it was something I wanted to really get another take on. For me, all I’ve ever heard were doctors telling me how much was wrong with me, and employers telling me I’m a liability to them if hired. To speak frankly, I think it’s a bunch of garbage. I was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder, something that’s been in my family since its been called manic depressive. I have intense anxiety sometimes, and waves of depression. This is then followed by “manic” states, and the best way to describe that would be using an analogy. The manic states are like if you went to Columbia a very rich man, came back with a different valuable product, took it all and then tried to do everything you put off for so long. So yeah, it’s basically a huge cocaine binge. The thing you have to remember is that I am not in control. If you really think I like the times where I’m so depressed I can’t even get out of bed, or the times I’m doing laundry while reading a book and typing a paper all the same time. It’s hectic, and it sucks, but that’s not even the worst part. A few months ago, an absolutely gorgeous girl, track star at UPenn, amazing grades, wanted to be a doctor or something good in the world. She was absolutely a stunner, a girl I’d never  be man enough to court. She jumped off a center city parking garage, because she couldn’t deal with the stress and pressures she was facing. She was facing such serious depression and nobody truly came to help her. That is the hardest part. The part where nobody can truly understand until they listen. A doctor will listen and tell you what’s wrong with you, an employer will listen and tell you why you aren’t good enough to be where they are, and a mother will listen and tell you it will all be alright. But aren’t they all liars? Those people told that to that beautiful girl, and now she lay with the worms and dirt. The stigma needs to end. More and more people are being diagnosed with mental disorders, and they are being shunned just as quickly. Not only do we need to start opening our eyes, we need to start opening our ears and our hearts. We may all wear the masks of Carcosa by day, but by night weep into the empty hands of self-loathing. The next time you hear a cry from the woods, take the path that leads you there. Help guide someone from the darkness and into the light. I know this sounds crazy, and pretty deep, but I’ve traveled into the woods enough times to know how scary it can be in there alone.

When I was growing up as a child, in my hometown, there was this grocery store called Stew Leonard’s. Every so often my parents would take my siblings and I on a trip there to go grocery shopping with them. I loved to go with them and pick out snacks and try out the different sample foods they would give out to people on the weekends. But there was one thing I did not like about going. They had workers dressed in full on animal costumes that would walk around and hug and talk to the children shopping with their parents. For some reason I was deathly afraid of the people walking around in costumes, I knew they were just people dressed in funny costumes but I was still so afraid. From the moment I knew that there were those creatures lurking around the store I was conditioned to become a nervous and scared wreck. I would hide behind my dad’s leg as we walked through every aisle until I knew that I was safe. I would cry at the sight of one of the animal costumes and we would have to walk away and avoid any encounters. I was conditioned to associate that store and those animals together and whenever we would go there even if there weren’t any people dressed in costumes that day I would still feel scared and nervous that one would pop out from somewhere. I had associated that particle grocery store and grocery stores in general with fear and upon enter I automatically felt uneasy and weary. It was a case of classical conditioning.

My conditioned and unconditioned response was nervousness, fear and crying while the conditioned stimulus was someone dressed in an animal costume. This conditioning didn’t last forever though. I outgrew my fear of people dressed in costumes around the age of eleven or twelve (thankfully). Although that response is extinct now, I still remember the feeling of seeing someone dressed in one of the animal costumes and instantly becoming anxious and wanting to cry.

On a slightly regular basis, if I am stressed out, I could easily find myself saying that I’m going to have a “panic attack.” Or, maybe while I am talking about things I am afraid of, I say that I have the “biggest phobia of the doctors” or lastly, if I walk into someone’s clean room and they tell me and the others “they have OCD.” But, as I sat in lecture I realized that I, along with plenty of other individuals, have said that I have a disease, disorder, or phobia, when in reality I have never realized -to an extent- what I was actually saying. Someone freaking out about a management exam or not having an outfit for formal doesn’t mean I am having a “panic attack.” It couldn’t be farther from the truth, that it’s actually quite alarming that we as individuals use these words so regularly in our vocabulary. Why does someone being a neat and organized person have to use the excuse “oh I’m like OCD I hate when my stuff is messed up.” instead of the simple and correct response of “I’m a neat freak.” Or even the difference between a phobia and a fear, and how we exaggerate the things that we feel in order to think that there is something abnormal about it. It’s actually extremely bizarre to me if I think about it in this perspective that people make up diseases or phobias or even disorders they have to make excuses for things that are NORMAL behavior! Even the way people use “heart attack”, “anxiety attack” and “panic attack” interchangeably when something negative, which wasn’t what they expected to happen. It is like people feel they need a reason or something to call an emotion, instead of the simple “I’m freaking out!” People use these words meaninglessly, and on some level if you think about it, it’s actually disrespectful. People change their whole lives around avoiding their phobias but I just cry after I get a shot at the doctor, so I hate going there and will try to not get sick so I don’t have to go, but yet I unknowingly put those two feelings in the same category.  That lecture really has opened my eyes to see that I actually never fully understood these phobias and diseases I thought I was talking about, and I want to be way more careful with the wording I choose to describe myself.

In our psych class we have been learning about the different ways that we learn behavior. Operant conditioning is the way we form associations between behaviors and resulting events. Edward Thorndike developed the law of effect which states that things that result in a satisfying experience are more likely to occur again in a similar situation. Positive and negative punishments and reinforcements help teach individuals acceptable versus unacceptable behavior. Looking back now, I realize that this is how we learn and these things shape who we are.

For example, when I was in 8th grade, I got in trouble for chewing gum during class, which was against our school policy. My math teacher caught me and gave me a detention for after school. This was a positive punishment because it was added instead of removed and I was forced to stay after school to serve my detention. I learned that I had to follow the rules or else I was going to get in trouble. After that I never received another detention because I had learned my lesson due to the punishment. When I was younger, my parents punished me by not allowing me to hang with friends on the weekend. At first, I didn’t believe their threats, but I realized I was wrong the hard way. One time my parents punished me because I was being rude to them. That was the weekend of one of my friends birthday parties and they refused to let me go. This is an example of negative punishment because they removed something that I had desire for.

In 6th grade, one of the assignments that we had to do during the school year was to read twenty-five books. Every time we finished a book, we let our teacher know and as a result she gave us a sticker to put next to our name on a poster in the back of the room. This was a positive reinforcer as we were given something valuable to let us know we were doing a good job and which strengthened our behavior by presenting a positive stimuli.  Everyday we exemplify negative reinforcements by doing things to avoid unpleasant events. For example, when I drive places, I drive the speed limit because I am trying to avoid a speeding ticket.

These are all examples of operant conditioning that I have experienced because I have learned what to do in a certain situation. After learning about operant conditioning, it makes sense that these type of punishments and reinforcements would teach us things and change the way we behave. We realize after experiences what is right and what is wrong due to these punishments and reinforcers which allow us to act the same way or differently when in a similar situation.

Learning is a very complex concept. It can be done in various ways. We can learn by processing information and rehearsing it. These methods usually take time to stick in your memory. There are some things that we learn, even if we don’t mean to. This learning come from experience. It will change our behavior and thoughts. Classical conditioning is a type of learning in which an organism learns to associate stimuli. This is done through acquisition. We associate a neutral stimuli with an unconditioned stimulus. It relies on respondent behavior which is an automatic response to a stimuli. When an unconditioned stimulus is paired with a conditioned stimulus enough times, it will create a conditioned response.

Classical conditioning happens to the majority of people sometime in their lifetime. An example that I have seen is in my two year old nephew. He has become terrified of a dancing reindeer that we have in our house around Christmas time. He loved playing with the reindeer. He would give it hugs and kisses every day. When he would push the button, the reindeer would sing Christmas songs and dance. He would dance along, laughing and singing. One day when he came over, he found his way over to the reindeer. This time when he pushed the button, he did not sing and dance alone with it. The reindeer danced right off of the table and fell on him. He started to cry. He was terrified because he thought that the reindeer was attacking him. He was terrified of the music. He even began to be afraid of his favorite little reindeer. He made the association between the music (conditioned stimulus) and the “attack” (unconditioned stimulus). He also made the generalization then that the reindeer is scary itself, even without the music playing. We had to move the reindeer to another room where he could not see it for the rest of the year. For two months, every time that he would come to our house, he would point down the hallway to where we hid the reindeer and note how scary the reindeer is, without even seeing it. My nephew is terrified of reindeer because of classical conditioning.

Classical conditioning is a type of learning that is exhibited. It has a condition stimulant and an unconditioned stimulant. The conditioned stimulant is a neutral stimulant like ringing a bell and the unconditioned response is not learned but is a reaction from the conditioned stimulus, like salivation. A famous experiment done by Pavlov trained dogs to associate the sounds of a bell with food. By ringing a bell and then giving them food, he found that the dogs would salivate. After doing this numerous times, he found that the dogs would salivate whenever they heard the sound of bell even if they weren’t given food. The dogs learned to associate the sound a bell, a conditioned stimulus, with food and saw they would salivate, the unconditional stimulus, with or without food.

In my home, I have seen this happen to my cat. My mom is the one who primarily feeds her each day. Every morning when she wakes up, my mom goes into the kitchen and puts food in my cats bowl. If my mom doesn’t fill up the bowl right away, my cat will follow her until she does. My cat learned that my mom going to the kitchen, the conditioned stimulus, means she gets food, and began to follow her, the unconditioned stimulus, until she got fed. It started out as my cat only doing this in the morning and led to her following my mom around whenever she got hungry. If my cat got hungry and my mom was walking towards the kitchen, then the cat would follow.

My mom is a school psychologist and our dinner conversations would always consist of interesting people. I took Psychology in high school and my teacher always brought up Ted Bundy for examples. At the time, I have no idea who he was.  I couldn’t help but want to find out more information about him and his disorders. Ted Bundy was an infamous serial killer in the United States. He is mostly known for his multiple attacks on young women. Most knew him as handsome, charismatic and charming, but he was intelligent when it came to his killings. He would fake injuries or disabilities to talk to women. After he gained their trust, he would lure them into his Volkswagen beetle. Once his plan had worked, he attacked the helpless woman. He would then sexually assault and murder his victims leaving their bodies in secluded areas.

His childhood was filled with traumatic events involving his family. His mother became pregnant at a young age. It is believed that incest with her father was a factor in the surprise pregnancy. He thought his birthmother was his sister while his grandparents acted as his parents. It is reported the grandfather was a very abusive man. He would physically attack his family members. There was a very wide history of mental illness in his family. In high school, Ted Bundy claimed he had no idea how to develop friendships and did not understand social interactions. But, his classmates described Bundy as “well known” and “well liked”. He had no sense of community with his peers. He was very distant from those around him. This might have set off his unwillingness to be close to anyone emotionally. He always seemed detached. Psychologist, Dorothy Lewis of the NYU School of Medicine, first diagnosed him with bipolar disorder. It was also said he suffered from dissociative identity disorder.

Most believed he turned into a different person during episodes. Bundy also claimed his victims deserved it stating, “They radiated vulnerability.” He always appeared delusional and showed no empathy towards anyone. He had no sense of what he had done wrong. I was amazed that he could be so disconnected from the world.