More hours in the day please??!

So...it has been a while since I have compiled a blog and I cannot apologise enough for this...my excuse??! There literally do not seem to be enough hours in the day!! How is it February already??...that does remind me though...

So, a quick catch up....I am in my final year at university and last semester I sat Abnormal Psychology. I have never enjoyed a module as much as this one - even the assessments did not seem to give me the usual grief that I feel when composing a plan or desperately trying to search for wider reading.  I think the reason for this was the freedom that the fabulous lectures gave us.  We had to write a case study on a person of choice that had been diagnosed with a mental illness and written a first person account of their illness.

As long as the illness was studied in the module, we were free to run with it.  I chose Kay Redfield-Jamison - An Unquiet Mind:

This book is an amazing read and I thoroughly recommend that, if you haven't already, you buy it.  I initially chose to use this for my case study as I am wanting to take a Clinical Pathway and was intrigued that such an role model and presence in the movement for Bipolar Disorder is by that of an individual that suffers from the illness itself. 

Even though I had to read this book with an academic head and make annotations and comparisons to the DSM-5 for the assignment - I still enjoyed the poetic and romantic way in which the book was written.  Kay is brutally honest about the Major Depressive Episodes that she encountered and the deeply sad attempt to take her own life, but then she describes the ecstatic highs of the Manic episodes, the dream-like states that she encountered and how she flew among the rings of Saturn - with this, Kay also describes the financially crippling spending sprees and constant flitting from one thought to the next, how she struggled to read, struggled to concentrate and struggled to continue as a functioning Clinical Psychologist without admitting that she needed help.

I can't help but feel that this account of Bipolar Disorder is as close to the illness as you can get without actually suffering from it, and this is why I strongly suggest that you give it a read.

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At the moment, I am sitting the 'Psychological Assessment' as well as the 'Forensic Applications in Psychology' module, which are both pretty heavy going but none-the-less enjoyable. In these, I am mainly learning the structure to assess the risk of an violent offender who is to be released/regrouped etc (HCR-20 v3) as well as psychometric testing (which I have just attempted and spectacularly failed!) plus other assessment tools used in a occupational, clinical or forensic setting. So, reading for these is a little on the structured side, in that I am learning about the history of the assessment tools and when they are best used and what traits these tools highlight in an individual.
Therefore my future blogs will mainly consist of reading that I am doing for my dissertation (at the moment I am attempting to read about Machiavelli and also the role of emotional intelligence) as well as reading for the Forensic module as mentioned above- so mainly papers regarding sex offenders, interventions, psychopathy, violent offenders and intimate partner crime  All of which sounds lovely!!

Right, I have put a reminder on my phone for next weeks blog - by then I will have read a new journal/book to talk about,

Have a good week my fellow geekers! 😎😎😄