NYCOM Psychiatry Club

It was time to bite the bullet.

Analysis depends on organization.

Todo tiene su proprio lugar. (My grandfather)

I had to evolve from the "pile" filing system. While I will be the first to tell you that I only lose things after I've organized them, to tell you the truth my internal schematic of where everything is in my house had long since reached capacity. I simply didn't know what I had, until, *sniff*, I threw it away.

So I turned a big pile of crap into a neat stack of A4 manilla envelopes, according to the method developed by Noguchi Yukio, economist. Unfortunately the original is in print and in Japanese, which, also unfortunately, I can not read. (yet. Someday...*sigh*.) Fortunately, there is an Anglophone translator-type (name of William Lise) who made a neat little webpage about it.

So far, it's pretty good. It's a little weird to be making envelopes for your passport, checkbooks, test scores, etc. But when I consider where they were previously (e.g. ye ole pile o' detritus), this is certainly an improvement. An interesting thing is that its pretty flexible--you can create an envelope for anything that you consider worth the effort. I made one for my rough drafts of my personal statements (dozens so far), another one for pictures to put into an album, and another for "Mental Status Exam study materials". I forsee whipping this out after my osteopathic internship to whip myself back into shape psychiatrically. (Hmm that sounds funny. I'll just let it hang there for awhile.)

Give it a shot. BTW, buy the envelopes in bulk from Staples or something, not raiding every pharmacy in a 5-block radius. Do as I say, not as I do.

Well, after about a year hiatus from blogging, I'm back. I may switch to a new blog, as I'm not really associated with the NYCOM Psych Club anymore. Maybe it's time to get reassociated. I'll give it a shot and call our previous faculty advisor, Dr. Goldblatt. It'd be a good excuse to talk to him anyway--he was a lifeline to psychiatry while I was in the psychological wasteland that is medical school.

Anyway, to cap off my new blooging (Ha! I meant "blogging"--shows you how long I've been gone) effort, an article about the recent activities of Martin Seligman(the "learned helplessness" prof from University of Pennsylvania), and a newish initiative to quantify happiness or wellbeing for British types. (Britishers (or people from Brit-land) hate happiness and would rather drink pints and pound the stuffing out of each other at soccer football matches than hold hands and chant Kum-ba-ya with us "schmaltzy" colonials.)

Some juicy tidbits:

...we think of happiness as a trivial pursuit for the Oprah generation, a Shangri-La perpetuated by self-help gurus.

Ha ha! Ha. Sob.

So what makes people happy?

One thing makes a striking difference. When two American psychologists studied hundreds of students and focused on the top 10% "very happy" people, they found they spent the least time alone and the most time socialising. Psychologists know that increasing the number of social contacts a miserable person has is the best way of cheering them up. When Jean-Paul Sartre wrote "hell is other people", the arch-pessimist of existentialist angst was wrong.

One thing about the "learned helplessness" study that you blithly and sagaciously talked about but probably never read:

[Seligman] reflected that one in three subjects — rats, dogs or people — never became "helpless", no matter how many shocks or problems beset them.

Fine, you say. Show me the skience! Fine, I say:

the inhibited toddlers showed greater activity on the brain's right side; activation of the lively toddlers' brains was on the left. Happiness and sadness are lopsided.

(Infarcts to key areas of the left-sided brain lead to various degrees of aphasia, but I haven't noticed people with right-sided lesions being happier. I guess I wasn't looking.

I could keep quoting, but it'd end up being the entire article, which is quite good. Go read it.