PsychoCinematic: November 2010

Why hello there.

So things have been going pretty well.

Weekly therapy sessions are ongoing, which is really wonderful. With each additional session, I feel less and less like a hopeless novice and more and more like an actual therapist who has the right to tell people what to do and make them talk about their lives. It’s nice. I’ve even taught skills and done fancy-sounding things like psychoeducation. I know. Doesn’t that sound AWESOME? It should. Because it is.

I’ve also recently picked up a testing case, which means that I have to torture some poor child with endless cognitive assessments. I’ve made them define words, play with blocks, write sentences with eraserless pencils... It makes me feel a little guilty, especially when we get to the tasks I would hate doing. For example: there is a subtest where I say a random sequence of letters and numbers, and my client has to repeat that sequence back to me, but in numerical and alphabetical order.

I would hate anyone who made me do that.

I haven’t had anyone launch across the table at me for making them do that subtest yet, but it’s probably an inevitability. It wouldn't be altogether unjustified.

Even so, testing is kind of cool. It’s a very different task from therapy. Someone comes in with a question, like whether they should get a diagnosis, or whether they can get a diagnosis ruled out, or they want to know why they’re having trouble in school, or whether they can get into a gifted program. You make them do all these little tasks that evaluate their brain’s skills in these incredibly discrete little ways, and once you put all the little pieces of information those tests give you together, you can give them an answer to their question. Really it’s just another way to learn about how people’s brains work, which is obviously why I’m doing this stuff in the first place.

Moving on. Conference number two is next week, and then from there I get to go straight home for Thanksgiving. This means in a few days I’ll be standing next to a poster with lots of statistical words on it, and then I’ll be eating homemade donuts and watching the post-parade dog show on Thanksgiving morning. I will allow you to guess which of these two upcoming events I’m more excited about.

Pre-conference number two, I get to give another lecture on sexual and eating disorders. I’m particularly excited to talk about gender identity disorder, because oh my is that stuff interesting. I’m particularly fond of the disorder based on my alma mater’s history of performing gender reassignment surgeries, along with some FASCINATING reporting NPR has done on children being treated for GID. If you’ve got the time/interest, you should take a listen!

Finally: I have officially entered phase two of my thesis data collection. I’m currently in the middle of reading abstracts to determine if they fit with my remaining search criteria, and so far it’s going pretty well. A lovely proportion of articles may actually make it into my thesis, which makes me happy. It would be nice to have a sample size I need more than two hands to count.

And now, on to the film talk.

To celebrate Halloween, a classmate and I went to a beautiful cathedral in our fair city to attend the fabulous Procession of the Ghouls. This included watching a scary silent movie, followed by a parade of elaborately costumed scary-looking demon people.

The film was “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” (1920), which was well-suited for the occasion. Silent films are by and large already kind of creepy, due to the unnatural muteness of their actors, the insane melodrama of gesture and music necessitated by the lack of spoken dialogue, and the foggy, jerky appearance of the images in much older cinema. Furthermore, given the surreal set design, it seems safe to say that Tim Burton took some cues from this movie. The actors rush around in spaces where structures create insane angles and are covered in jarring patterns, all of which foster a sense of madness and disorientation.

That being said, silent film isn’t really my genre. As a general rule, I really love older movies, but silents are just a little too anachronistic for me. Perhaps not surprisingly, I find it hard to fully immerse myself in a movie that has to jump between action and large chunks of text to get its story across. Also wtf, no zombies?! Nevertheless, the movie was fun, and a great selection for a Halloween exhibition in an already creepy nighttime cathedral. I gave it a 3.

So instead of my usual, more extensive film analysis, I have a treat for you:

Pictures!!

These are blurrier than my usual photography, but I feel like that captures the spirit of the experience.

Enjoy!