September 2015 Update

Favorite picture of the month
my brand new niece Leilani

This has been an incredibly busy month for me. I started my second class of the semester (now I'm taking Abnormal Psychology and an EMT certification class). These, together with my full time job in a nursing home and my volunteer work at a crisis hotline, keep me feeling pretty darned overwhelmed. 

Brave New Films: This is Crazy

In a previous post, I discussed my thoughts on Frontline's New Asylums documentary, about the overcriminalization of the mentally ill. Millions of taxpayer dollars are being spent on housing the mentally ill in prisons, when they could be treated more affordably (and more humanely) by the community. Because that video (filmed in 2005) left me with a lot of questions, I looked up some more recent resources. Of the videos I watched, my favorite was a series created by Brave New Films.

Game of Thrones, by George R. R. Martin

Game of Thrones, by George R. R. Martin

What can I say about Game of Thrones that hasn't already been said? I'm not even sure how to summarize it properly because there is so much that would be left out. But, briefly, Lord Eddard Stark is swept up into a web of conspiracy when he is suddenly demanded to go to the capital city to be the Hand of the King. He must protect his family, his honor, and the king from enemies - and everyone is an enemy. 

Frontline: New Asylums

New Asylums (2005) is a Frontline documentary that delves into the problem of housing the mentally ill in prison systems. Believe it or not, the world's three largest asylums for mentally ill are the Cook County Jail in Chicago, the Twin Towers of the Los Angeles County Jail, and Riker's Island in New York. This problem has been escalating ever since the mid 1900's when deinstitutionalization of mentally ill and intellectually challenged became a popular movement to encourage "humane" treatment of mentally ill and to reduce state expenditures on medical care. 

Contemporary viewpoints on treating mental illness - psychology

This post will discuss the psychological causes and treatments of mental illness, as described in Butcher's Abnormal Psychology.

Psychological viewpoints consider humans not only as biological entities but as products of our personalities and experiences. There are three major psychosocial views on behavior: psychodaynamic, behavioral, and cognitive-behavioral. 

Contemporary viewpoints on treating mental illness - biology

Chapter 3 of Butcher's Abnormal Psychology has too much information for me to adequately summarize in one post. Therefore, I will break it into a few posts. So please bear with me. Of the chapters so far, this chapter was the longest and the least interesting to me. Which is unfortunate, because it's also the chapter that has the highest distribution of points in the upcoming exam. 

The main purpose of this chapter is to review the three contemporary viewpoints on treating mental illness - biological, psychological, and social. This post will review the biological causes of mental illness.

Abnormal Psychology in Contemporary Society

Our class only read part of chapter 17 of Butcher's Abnormal Psychology: a section about inpatient mental health treatment in contemporary society and another about controversial legal issues and the mentally ill.