Author Archives: Mackenzie Elizabeth Kirsch

Schizophrenia and Labeling

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I’m a big fan of Grey’s Anatomy and through the past 10 seasons, they have had pretty much every medical mystery, emergency, and rare case you could imagine. One episode that really stuck out in my mind as we learned about Mood Disorders and Dissociate Personalities was an episode that focused around a teenage girl, Haley, who was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. According to the book, patients with this type of schizophrenia suffer from hallucinations and delusions, the most common form being auditory hallucinations, when the patient hears voices. As we discussed in class, when it is said that someone is hearing voices, most of the time they are suffering from schizophrenia. Throughout the episode, you learn that Haley was diagnosed months ago and her grandfather had schizophrenia, which follows the consistency of genetics playing a role in this disorder. All Haley is saying when she is at the hospital is that she is not crazy and begging for people to believe her. She is incapable of functioning on her own and even gets to the point where she wants to stab herself with an injection filled with drugs that would kill her.

The doctors do a few tests to see if there is anything they can do to help. They discover that she has a small hole in her ear that causes her to hear every single noise going on inside her body and noises outside her body are amplified. She is not hearing voices inside her head. With a simple surgery, she was cured.

Obviously this is just TV and not a real case, but it definitely has some similarities to what we learned about in class. The first doctors that diagnosed her knew that she was hearing something inside her head, which tends to lead towards schizophrenia, so that is what she was diagnosed. Then when she came to the hospital in Grey’s Anatomy, not until the second round of tests did the doctors realize something else could be wrong. They labeled her as a schizophrenic and let all her other symptoms be explained by her “craziness.” Labeling occurs when people will treat someone differently who has a particular disorder or view them differently. We talked about a real life example very similar to this in class when people who did not suffer from schizophrenia told doctors they heard voices. They acted normally otherwise and answered all other medical questions truthfully. Some of these people were in hospitals for over 20 days for observation because doctors viewed them differently with the schizophrenia label, even though they did not have any of the real symptoms. Labels aren’t always bad, but they can really have a strong effect on how the patient is viewed.

If you’re interested in the clips from the show, below is a YouTube link that has all the clips about Haley and how the doctors discovered what her actual prognosis was.

Flashbulb memories, misinformation effect

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When I was in fourth grade, my family and I took a trip to Florida. We visited the Everglades where you can take a bike ride through them and tour the whole area. Along the bike path, there were swamps where live alligators would be. There were even some alligators lying outside of the swamps just inches way from the bike path. They weren’t dangerous unless you taunted them, in fact they hardly even moved. If you didn’t look closely enough you would probably think they were statues. Also along the bike path there were occasionally tour buses that would come that were available for people if they did not want to bike the whole path. Whenever a bus was coming close, all bikers had to pull off the side of the path and make room for the bus to get by. My family and I were only about three miles away from getting back to the car when a bus started coming towards us. The rest of my family pulled off to the side just fine, however, I was the youngest and was struggling a little with my bike. I tried my best to pull over without falling but I just couldn’t balance myself. Before I knew it I was soaking wet with swamp water all over me. Of course I was mad I fell into the water, but I was more concerned about an alligator being in the water with me. Quickly, my mom pulled me out of the water and I was back on land, safe and sound.

To me, this is a flashbulb memory. Flashbulb memories are when an “unexpected event has strong emotional associations for the person remembering it.” Because it has such a strong association, the memory seems to have much more vivid details and I feel like it just happened yesterday. Since it has such a high emotional effect on me that memory also went through automatic encoding which is when information requires less or almost no rehearsing for it to fully be encoded.

Since I’m the youngest in my family, they like to pick on my a lot and of course this story is always everyone’s favorite. Because of that, I have heard this story be told countless times. A possible reason behind me thinking I remember every single detail of this incident is because of the misinformation effect, which is when information heard after the event influence a person’s actual memory of the event. I will hear my mom tell the story and think I am recalling my memory, but really I am just being influenced by her recall of the incident.

*Definitions from Psychology textbook.

Behaviorism/Natural Observation

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Sometimes in psychology, being able to visually see a particular theory or concept can be tricky, but that is not the case when it comes to behaviorism. Behaviorism focuses on people’s behavior and the way it can change depending on their environment. It is a part of psychology that is more than just trying to examine the inside of the brain and that’s why it interests me so much. You are actually able to see the changes in someone if their environment around them changes rather than having to hook up some crazy machine to test the neurons in their brain. A more modern way of studying behavior is behavioral psychology and that focuses more on punishment and reinforcement and how those things will affect a person’s behavior.

For me, I’ve witnessed behavioral psychology all the time. For all my life up until high school I was a gymnast. Before every competition we would always practice our routines over and over again. After awhile, you start to get tired and seem to not care quite as much. Obviously our coach wasn’t able to watch all of us at the same time so we could get away with slacking a little bit. Towards the end of each workout, our coach would watch each of our routines one at a time. We called these “pressure routines.” If the routine was up to her standards we would be rewarded in someway, and if she did not approve of the routine there would be some sort of consequence. Since we knew we would be rewarded for a good performance, all of our routines suddenly got a little bit better, even though we were all exhausted. There were still times when we had to do the consequence, but for the most part people performed better and their behavior changed.

That example does not only touch on the topic of behaviorism and behavioral psychology, but also naturalistic observation. We knew that when we were being watched, we needed to perform to the best of our ability. However, at the times when our coach wasn’t watching us, we were able to take it easy to give ourselves a break. We wouldn’t slack off every practice, or take advantage of our coach on a daily basis, but there was an obvious difference in people’s performances when the pressure was on and they were being watched. In addition, it wasn’t just being watched that made behaviors change. The entire environment changed and became much more serious since our coach and teammates were watching. Because of these behavioral changes that occur when someone knows they are being watched or rewarded for something, psychologists know to be careful and aware of these things when study people’s behavior.