General Information:
The project is done with another student.
You two select a topic in abnormal psychology of interest to you and approved by your instructor.
Prepare a detailed outline for a presentation (not just a phrase for each idea covered).
The oral class presentation is about 50 minutes in length, including questions and activities.
You are to make an appointment one week prior to your presentation to discuss your topic and your detailed outline.
This outline will be copied for all members of the class to assist their learning of the material you will present.
Many people choose a particular disorder.
There are other ideas, and I encourage you to think about a wider range of topics. See "Topics" below.
I don't expect you to summarize a textbook, that'll bore you and us to tears. I expect you'll find one area that is most interesting, so people focus on causes, diagnosis, or treatments, not all three. I expect you to help the class struggle with the piece you choose. For example, how much of ADHD is children suffering because they canıt concentrate and how much is it a way to medicate children so they can sit still in large numbers for most of the day? The identified patient idea from family systems therapy works here well, too. Have some area of depth / interesting angle. Thus, I donıt mind if you skim over or provide an overview of other areas.
Important Areas:
Choose one of the three main areas to focus on:
Cause
Description and Diagnosis,
or
Treatments.
Your focus may be different if you don't choose a specific disorder. Then touch on each of the following to some extent (can be as little as a couple of sentences).
1. Disorder as a Strength
How can we see the disorder as a strength? What questions does it raise for all of us? Remember the effort to put on one's public face that we'll talk about the first couple days of class. The question for each of us is: how much effort do we put into our public face? Can we help our friends, co-workers, and family members spend less effort on their public faces? When you struggle with suicide you may have a deep answer as to why to live; those who live with delusions help us see how we use and abuse delusions in "normal" life (cf. "Miracle on Thirty Three Street")
2. The issue of attribution
What aspect of the problem is the personıs problem and what is the family / job / societyıs problem? Consider the general criteria: the problem isn't just anxiety, there's usually something they are anxious about that the family or society doesn't want to look at. Much time is spent in therapy working on something akin to the serenity prayer (or in the vernacular: ³Whose sh** is it?² ) Include examples of how the same symptoms and examples from cases could be interpreted as the person's problem and society's problem. E.g. ADHD can be seen as: we require kids to focus too much, bad student teacher ratios, almost all the diagnosis is in regards to school behavior - teacher control mechanism
3. "Behind the Eyes"
What does it feel like to experience the disorder? 1st person, autobiographies are key. Descriptive pieces that show you how it feels to experience it. I am particularly interested in how the disorder affects how people go through their everyday lives. We'll spend quite a bit of time on this at the beginning of the quarter. There are excerpts from stories on the CD-ROM I gave you. Also, on the website there is a list of first person accounts.
4. Along the scale
How can we differentiate between: severe cases that are very debilitating, mild cases where it is interfering in some clear ways, and "normal" behavior that is like the symptoms but does not meet the criteria? For a couple of symptoms, or causes, or treatments, show what mild, medium, and intense variations of the same thing look like.
5. Cross cultural info
In diagnosis this might be whether it is considered a disorder in many cultures, whether it is frequent/infrequent, or how it tends to show up. In causes, effects of culture, discrimination (privilege/oppression), and economics are often discussed. In treatment, there are some interesting therapies in non-American cultures (e.g. Morita Therapy in Japan), healers that are not psychologists.
Cases
Consider using a case (our casebook, DSM videos, DSM casebook (library), Vitus casebook in the library) or using two cases to show how the same issue plays out in 2 cases. Consider excerpt/summarize highlight. Highlight the areas that show the criteria (how bad it is). Highlight issues & challenges with this case (maybe "easy part" & "hard part"); that is, this part clearly shows criteria or therapy, another part that raises good questions.
I strongly recommend videos of cases of real people as opposed to popular films. Films can work, though. Be sure to have a particular point thatıs illustrated, and show a couple of minutes before and after. Feel free to give very brief narrative to set up the piece.
Topics:
Most people will choose a particular disorder and focus on that.
I encourage you to find an interesting reading, idea, issue, question, concern, case, etc, and we can build a topic from that.
What also might be interesting:
- How it looks it across different disorders.
- The process of making a drug legal and then generic.
- Are there fad diagnoses? from hysteria to schizophrenia to manic depression to borderline personality disorder
- Misdiagnoses which people are more likely to be diagnosed? With which disorders?
- Comparing therapy and other processes: e.g. how does a systemic belief in spirits serve some therapeutic and social functions?