SHARON DANIELS - CLINICAL CONSULTANT PSYCHOLOGIST
Are You Sane?
The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four persons is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they are okay, then it's you.
Expert Witness
One day at a trial, an eminent psychologist was called to testify. A severe no nonsense professional, she sat down in the witness chair unaware that it's rear legs were set precariously on the back of the raised platform.
"Will you state your name?" asked the district attorney.
Tilting back in her chair she opened her mouth to answer, but instead catapulted head-over-heels backward and landed in a stack of exhibits and recording equipment. Everyone watched in stunned silence as she extricated herself, rearranged her dishevelled dress and hair and was re-seated on the witness stand. The glare she directed at onlookers dared anyone to so much as smirk.
"Well, doctor," continued the district attorney without changing expression, "we could start with an easier question."
Piaget's conservation experiment.
Thanks to Ross Williams, Comp Sci, Uni of
A delightful story appears on page 106 (10.8 Education and Development) of Marvin Minsky's book "The Society of Mind" (Picador Edn 1988). The story relates to the psychologist Piaget's experiments on children of their understanding of conservation of quantity under transformation.
"All this reminds me of a visit to my home from my friend Gilbert Voyat, who was then a student of Papert and Piaget and later became a distinguished child psychologist. On meeting our five-year-old twins, his eyes sparkled, and he quickly improvised some experiments in the kitchen. Gilbert engaged Julie first, planning to ask her about whether a potato would balance best on one, two, three or four toothpicks. First, in order to assess her general development, he began by performing the water jar experiment. The conversation went like this:
Gilbert: "Is there more water in this jar or in that jar?"
Julie: "It looks like there's more in that one. But you should ask my brother, Henry. He has conservation already."
Gilbert paled and fled.
Moral: Don't try to perform psychological experiments on the children of psychologists!
PSYCHOLOGY EXPERIMENT
A very shy man goes into a bar and sees a beautiful woman sitting at the bar. After an hour of gathering up his courage, he finally goes over to her and asks, tentatively, "Um, would you mind if I chatted with you for a while?" To which she responds by yelling, at the top of her lungs, "No, I won't sleep with you tonight!" Everyone in the bar is now staring at them. Naturally, the guy is hopelessly and completely embarrassed and he slinks back to his table.
After a few minutes, the woman walks over to him and apologises. She smiles at him and says, "I'm sorry if I embarrassed you. You see, I'm a graduate student in psychology and I'm studying how people respond to embarrassing situations."
To which he responds, at the top of his lungs, "What do you mean, $200?"
HOT AIR BALOON
Two men are in a hot-air balloon. They drift into a dense cloud bank and are stuck there for hours. Finally as they emerge they look around at the ground below in hopes of figuring out their location. They see a man in a garden and shout down to him.
"Hello down there! Can you tell us where we are?"
"The man below replies, "You're in a hot-air balloon."
The first man looks at his partner and comments, "Just our luck, a psychologist."
The partner asks, "Why do you say he's a psychologist?"
The first man answers, "Well, what he said was obviously true, but it didn't help at all."
OBSESSIVE/COMPULSIVE
A Stanford research group advertised for participants in a study of the obsessive-compulsive disorder. They were looking for therapy clients who had been diagnosed with this disorder. The response was gratifying: they got 3,000 responses about three days after the ad came out. Unfortunately, they were all from the same guy.
Pavlov
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
What did the sign on Pavlov's lab door say? Please knock. DON'T ring the bell.
PTSD -- Psychotherapist Trainee Stress Disorder
Symptoms include, but are not limited to...
1. Overwhelming urge to strangle any person who glibly says, "You're having personal problems? YOU should know how to fix them, you're the psychologist, heh heh."
2. When someone accuses you of being "antisocial" because you have to study instead of socialize, you scream, "No, I'm being obsessive-compulsive! If I we're antisocial, I'd beat the crap out of you right now...".
3. Compulsion to diagnose and design treatment plans for TV characters.
4. Getting excited about relaxing adventures such as grocery shopping.
5. Playing on the Internet all night to avoid any "productive" (as defined by your professors) activity.
This disorder is caused by...
1. Having to try to reason with people who are totally out of contact with reality -- e.g., professors.
2. An average of 3 hours sleep per week.
3. Working 2 part time jobs, in addition to classes and training, to pay for your tuition.
4. A steady diet of bagels (munched while running from class to job to class) and chocolate covered espresso beans.
5. Stat-ware packages that mutilate your project beyond recognition.
6. Family, friends, and acquaintances who assume you'll always be their 24-hr free shrink, and never have any emotional needs of your own
This message was originally created by PTSD
sufferer, Carolyn D. Sullins of the
Let There Be Light
A doctor of psychology was doing his normal morning rounds when he entered a patient's room. He found Patient #1 sitting on the floor, pretending to saw a piece of wood in half. Patient #2 was hanging from the ceiling, by his feet.
The doctor asked patient number 1 what he was doing. The patient replied, "Can't you see I'm sawing this piece of wood in half!?" The doctor enquired of Patient #1 what Patient #2 was doing. Patient #1 replied, "Oh. He's my friend, but he's a little crazy. He thinks he's a lightbulb." The doctor looks up and notices Patient #2's face is going all red.
The doctor asks Patient #1, "If he's your friend, you should get him down from there before he hurts himself!"
Patient #1 replies, "What?! And work in the dark?!"
Top 10 Signs a Therapist is Approaching Burn-out
by Storm A. King,
10) You think of the peaceful park you like as "your private therapeutic milieu."
9) You realize that your floridly psychotic patient, who is picking invisible flowers out of mid air, is probably having more fun in life than you are.
8) A grateful client, who thinks you walk on water, brings you a small gift and you end up having to debrief your feelings of unworthiness with a colleague.
7) You are watching a re-run of the Wizard of Oz and you start to categorize the types of delusions that Dorothy had.
6) Your best friend comes to you with severe relationship troubles, and you start trying to remember which cognitive behavioral (sic) technique has the most empirical validly for treating this problem.
5) You realize you actually have no friends, they have all become just one big case load.
4) A co-worker asks how you are doing and you reply that you are a bit "internally preoccupied" and "not able to interact with peers" today.
3) Your spouse asks you to set the table and you tell them that it would be "countertherapeutic to your current goals" to do that.
2) You tell your teenage daughter she is not going to start dating boys because she is "in denial," "lacks insight", and her "emotions are not congruent with her chronological age."
And, the number one reason a therapist may be burning out....
Important Communication
Patient: Doctor, I get the feeling that people don’t give a hoot about anything I say.
Psychiatrist: So?
Dry Humour
After hearing that one of the patients in a mental hospital had saved another from a suicide attempt by pulling him out of a bathtub, the director reviewed the rescuer's file and called him into his office.
"Mr. James, your records and your heroic behavior (sic) indicate that you're ready to go home. I'm only sorry that the man you saved later killed himself with a rope around the neck."
"Oh, he didn't kill himself," Mr. James replied. "I hung him up to dry."
Lost?
How do crazy people go through the forest?
They take the psycho-path.