Psy-Splash

Foster Care Youth

Alex — Thu, 10 May 2012 01:28:05 +0000

Fact: Youth in the U.S. that are in Foster Care are twice as likely to be diagnosed with PTSD than veterans. Source:

Most kids in Foster Care that I have worked with suffered from PTSD as well as some type of attachment issue. I don’t think that it is an issue with the Foster Parents- these people are heros, and most don’t realize the immensity of the challenge that they are undertaking when they open their home as a permanent placement.

Still, this statistic is surprising: you are TWICE as likely to have PTSD if you were raised in the system than if you were in combat. People were shooting at you, you may have witnessed people die, yet you are still better off than a child raised by the system.

Sand timers…

Alex — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 02:50:56 +0000

They’re extremely useful when teaching kids how to take a time-out. Just… buy cheap ones. Some kids get pissed while waiting.

And interesting exchange

Alex — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 23:54:29 +0000

Today when going to the store, I was getting out of my car when I saw a girl talking on her cell phone. Suddenly, she broke out into tears! I wondered, “What could have happened?” I pictured maybe her boyfriend broke up with her, or her mother screamed insults at her, or maybe her uncle got cancer. Maybe she was fired from her job, or someone started an awful rumor about her. I don’t know. It was odd though, to see someone crying so loudly in such a public place (there were other kids hanging out after school in front of the liquor store next door). As I passed by, I gave her space by walking a good ways around her, not making eye contact. Something didn’t feel right about it. As I approached the door to the store I was going to, I looked at her and she was off the phone now.
“Are you okay?” I asked her. She paused, and really thought about the question. After a silence, she nodded her head and said, “yes”. She probably wasn’t okay, and discussing an intimate situation with a stranger probably wasn’t the wises thing to do. Still, I like to feel that it helped her a bit to know that someone noticed her pain. Hopefully if she did need some help that she went to get it.

What the kids know about Social Media that the adults have yet to figure out

Alex — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 00:10:23 +0000

Doing Behavioral work with kids and adolescents has given me a distinct vantage that most people in my generation (the young working generation) and especially the older generation do not have. I observe tomorrows trends forming before they hit a mainstream explosion. This is true for music, fashion, and most importantly, web technology.
Lately, I have been reading a lot of business literature, and the buzzword in the industry these days is “social media”. All of the big wigs in suites are praising social media and Facebook as if it crawled out of primordial sludge yesterday, and they are hedging all of their bets on it being the future of business. While I don’t disagree that their vision of an interconnected web of weak interpersonal boundaries feeding the voyeuristic appetite of a preying advertising machine is as certain possibility, I don’t ever read articles where people speculate that there could be a decline in people’s dependence on Facebook. In this interview with Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, Hoffman mocks Zuckerberg’s insistence that everything will be social in the future, and I agree with him.
There are some steps forward that cannot be taken back- once out of the bag, certain cats will not go return. People are going to share funny photos and video, personal photos, and will share messages with their social community. However, having a universal hangout where everything is shared in one location? Those days happened, and I don’t expect them to stick around.
Back when social communities (i.e. Friendster and MySpace) first began, kids loved them because they could post all of the trash talking and flirting that took place in school online (I was part of that generation). This lasted for a few years before the adults began to take notice, and they were appalled by the private lives of their children. Sex and drugs hit harder and sooner than they ever anticipated, and they couldn’t believe the filth leaving their children’s mouths. In retaliation, kids started making their profiles private or making separate ones that their parents didn’t know about to once again regain some privacy over their lives. MySpace became despised by the public as it was an online predators’ wet dream: personal information about youth and their habits (often containing places of residence, phone numbers, and even intimate photos) as well as unregulated (by parents and authorities) access to communicate with them. Law enforcement caught on to the party eventually, but not before significant damage was done.
Image-conscious young adults of the collegiate population flocked to the more exclusive community forming on Facebook. Because membership was limited to only the best Universities in the country, people used their real names to register, establishing a trend of authenticity in the content they shared that I don’t feel most users today understand. In the days of MySpace, AIM, Yahoo, and MSN, people used handles that often hid their true identities. Digital camera and webcams were so expensive and of low quality that very few people had digital media to represent their “real” lives anyway. The pre-Facebook Internet had a lot of people hiding behind digital masks in dark, HTML covered rooms. When Facebook arrived, college students put their real names, real interests, real stories and real photos online because they thought that only their close friends, who were doing the same, would see this information. It wasn’t long before more exclusive colleges and universities were added to the list. As the pool of un-included exclusive universities shallowed, less-exclusive, larger schools were added. Next, High School students were included, and belong, the general public followed. Facebook lost it’s exclusivity, but strangely, the culture of transparency remained. People were still signing up using their real names, sharing real interests, stories and photos.
Something else happened with the expansion of Facebook that never happened with MySpace nor Friendster: adults from older generations decided to trust Facebook and it’s clean reputation. Advertisers and marketers were loving it: finally, everyone was at the party! And everyone was naked! There was plenty of money to be made selling clothes when you could clearly see what size everyone wore.
The marketers, advertisers and big wigs because so excited to be included in this party that they missed on small detail: the MySpace problem had reared it’s head again, bringing the generational chase full circle. Whenever adults join the kids’ party, the party suddenly becomes not cool. And this is a good thing. Grandma doesn’t want to read about little Kathy’s night out at the club any more than Katy wants her grandmother to know about that night. Yet, because of Facebook’s many social features, that information is pushed into our feeds. The new privacy features are confusing people. So how are kids going to keep adults out of their personal lives again? There are two options: stop using Facebook or stop the transparent use of social media.
A possible trend of declining Facebook use be in progress. Google+, Google’s attempt to mimic Facebook, was not the hit everyone expected it to be. Is it possible that kids these days are tired of social media? Or it is that they’re becoming smarter about it? The kids that I work with don’t trust putting their personal information online the way they did five years ago- they’re afraid that their parents are going to find out what they have been up to. They aren’t as trusting with their real name and photos anymore because they’ve seen how easily celebrities get their accounts hacked. They are becoming more clever and guarded with their personal information. However, thanks to the desensitization and boundary breaking of nearly a decade’s worth of exposure to Facebook, their concept of what is considered private information may have been permanently altered. Only time will tell.

Dissertation Progress

Alex — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 22:33:53 +0000

Anyone wondering why I have not posted anything lately and assumed that it was because nothing was getting done would typically be correct. However, over the past three months that assumption does not hold true. I have been cracking away daily at this thing and I will be done very soon. My chair recently told me that I should stop shooting for the June deadline that we were initially gunning for, and instead aim for the May deadline in two months! This summer, celebrations will abound!

And Yet Another New Study Supports My Dissertation

Alex — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 09:06:24 +0000

I really need to get my study published before anyone else publishes my ideas (I would not be surprised if researchers have not come across this blog by this point). One of my major contributions (and the focus of my study) is the effectiveness of comments left on therapeutic blogs. There was a study published a month ago that looks at exactly this. You can find the study, and an article about it here. One weakness of this study that I hope to correct is the objectiveness of their quantitative measures. In other words, the authors had therapists rate how well the subjects were doing based on their blog writings, and there is plenty of room for the individual therapist’s beliefs and differing opinions to have a bias. What one therapist believes to be healthy could be interpreted as hurting by another. I hope to correct for this by decreasing the amount of individual interpretation done by the raters (my crew of therapists and psychologists). Regardless, it is both validating and upsetting to watch other people exploring and publishing my ideas. Only I am to blame for not getting them (my ideas) out there sooner.

A Parable by Paul Jacob

Alex — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 20:16:20 +0000

I found this parable in some old papers today while cleaning house.

A wise old farmer was considered rich by the villagers because he owned a horse. One day the horse ran away and the villagers said to the farmer, “How unfortunate that your horse ran away.” He responded, “maybe.”

The next day the horse returned, brining with it a wild horse, and thereby increasing the farmer’s wealth. The villagers exclaimed, “How fortunate!” to which the the farmer again responded, “maybe.”

The following day the farmer’s son, while trying to train the wold horse, was thrown, breaking his leg. the villagers again commented, “How unfortunate.” Once again the farmer responded, “maybe.”

The following day, the King’s men rode through the village conscripting all the young men for the army. They didn’t take the farmer’s son because of his broken leg.

Things are not always as they appear to be. Life presents us with situations and conditions which, in themselves, are neither good nor bad. We assign meaning to these conditions, thereby creating our fortunes and misfortunes.

Finding Therapeutic Blogs- Suddenly this study becomes real

Alex — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 06:51:40 +0000

Originally, I had a sound plan for finding therapeutic blogs to study for my dissertation. Using a ping site, I would read, say, every fifth blog to see if it was a journal style blog suitable for my study. However, since I am now looking specifically for blogs being used for self-therapy (or for confessional, coping, or other therapeutic purposes), using this process will take much, much longer. Just to get an idea for how difficult it may be to track down blogs being used for this function, I did a few searches on ixQuick and Xanga to see what I could find. It didn’t take much searching to find a few by using the keywords “trauma survivor” “cancer survivor” “molestation survivor” “confession blog”. I skimmed the blogs, and (aside from the one confession blog that I found, which had a lot of juicy gossip-type details) the material was pretty superficial. Still, it would work for my study. There was an abundance of blogs written about surviving cancer, and I was considering using only blogs about this topic when the thought hit me: what about the bloggers who didn’t survive cancer. So I did a search for blogs written by people with terminal illness. I read one of them and after only a post and a half I wanted to cry. For most of this study, I have been taking a methodical, technical approach to this topic. I was enjoying the literature that informs one of how to literally break healing down to science. I’ve had my methodology loosely planned out for years now. What I wasn’t prepared for was the human aspect of what I have been working on: I had forgotten about the people who are suffering. Intellectualization is an easy way to distance oneself from emotions. And now, as I begin to analyze real therapeutic blogs, I need to prepare myself to reconnect with my goal for doing this: people. People and their pain. And hopefully, how I can help them with it.

I like to believe that it was my idea first

Alex — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 07:33:57 +0000

During my undergraduate years, I was fascinated with computers and social media (or what was then the precursor to today’s social media). Even though I was not a computer science major, I worked as a lab consultant in the CIT (Center for Information Technology)’s computer laboratories. I majored in Psychology, and kept computers as a hobby.
While at a social gathering my senior year, I entered into a heated debate about web technologies with an older attendee with whom I had never met. He turned out to be Charlie Knoll, the founder of Andera. He offered me a job on the spot. I had already enrolled in graduate school, and did not accept his offer. However, I never lost my interest in social media. Fast forward a few years to the early days of weblogging. I was in graduate school when the blogging boom happened. A number of my contemporaries were very familiar with writing therapy- which fascinated me to no end. Therapy. Done without a therapist. To someone with my background in computers, I immediately saw Internet Therapy. Blogging was huge- there had to be a connection between the two. I explored the idea with professors, I searched the literature, and I scoured the Internet. No one had put together what I considered to be the most “2+2″ since arithmetic had been invented.
I pitched the idea of doing my dissertation on writing therapy done through blogs to my professors, and none seemed thrilled with the idea. Maybe it’s because they were skeptical of therapy done over the Internet, or the lack of trust for such an open medium, but I felt defeated. I pressed on with my idea anyway, but dragged my feet because I didn’t have much confidence in the concept. Searches through the literature didn’t help either: I had to craft this study from the ground up because no one had done anything similar. Ever.
Years passed, and while I was dragging my feet, other people had finally put two and two together. This past spring I dug my face back into the literature to discover that people were now buzzing about doing therapy using blogs! Take for example this Scientific America article I discovered today.
One the one hand, it’s validating to see that my idea wasn’t as ridiculous as my professors first made it sound. Just because I was new to the field of Psychology didn’t mean that I didn’t have anything to contribute. However, I can’t stop kicking myself for having this idea years before I had seen it in print or on the Internet elsewhere. If I only would have had more confidence in myself, I could have had my dissertation done years ago, and would then have a legitimate claim to what may or may not have been my idea “first”.

Is This Bad News or Good News About Weightloss?

Alex — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 22:16:03 +0000

Here’s some validating new for all of you people struggling to lose weight: No, you are not lazy. And no, you are not a pig. Some new research explains why you are having such a hard time. Basically, after you shed a ton of weight, the body knows how much you used to weigh. It thinks that you need to weight that much again, and it fiercely battles to get you back up there. How does it do this? In two ways. The first is by making you hungry. Even when you are full, your body will tell you that it is still hungry. Second, the body “saves” its energy and does not burn off calories as easy as it used to when you were heavier. The researchers found that even after a year has passed since all that weight was lost, the body will still be fighting to get back to its old weight.
So how could this possibly be good news? Two reasons. The first is that you have the knowledge that it is not your fault. Your body has been tricking you into eating more food than it needs, and it has been making you work harder than needed to burn a few calories. For people who have felt guilty about being overweight for many years, that must come as a relief. The next good thing that this article tells us is that dieter can expect their hunger to be wrong. It will be a difficult thing to curb hunger, but at least being aware that you will face that challenge lets you prepare mentally and emotionally for the battle. I’m a big fan of mindfulness, that might be a tactic that people trying to keep weight off might try. Meditation can do amazing things, and while it may not be powerful enough to levitate your body, it may be just enough to dull cravings. I will let some who has tried it be the judge of how possible it is.