Psychoblog

there are very few things that make me angry, so that i can feel my cheeks heating up. i spotted this in the independent today though which did the trick. apparently people wanting to do degrees in “fashionable” subjects like media studies and *psychology* should pay more tuition fees than other students. this is because they aren’t considered “essential for our future”. instead people should be encouraged to pursue scientific and medical degrees.

i have a feeling that if the person i quoted were to be struck down with a stroke say, or parkinsons, alzheimers, or suffer a traumatic brain injury from bouncing his bonce off something, then he might consider psychologists to be fairly essential to his future. or if he were to develop schizophrenia, clinical depression, an addiction, some form of anxiety disorder. or if his kids started displaying behavioural problems at school. or if there is a criminal on the run near to his home and he would really like them to be caught soon etcetc.

people tend to have an extremely narrow, misconceived view of what psychology is and it’s not difficult to see why when you see the pop psychology stuff that gets into the media and published in self-help books. i remember my parents being horrified when i told them i wanted to do psychology at university. they told me that it is a wishy-washy nothing subject that won’t get me anywhere in life. they don’t say that anymore. psychology very definitely *is* a science. whatever brand of psychology you do, if you don’t conduct your experiments in a scientific way then you just won’t get them published or acknowledged.

psychology also tends to overlap with other disciplines, ones that the quoted man actually does like. in what i do i work with doctors (real medical ones, like my boss), radiologists, speech therapists and physicists. we are all working towards the same goal, we just bring our different expertise and perspectives to the problem at hand and try to combine them to make the big picture. so, is what i bring to the table of lesser value? the radiologist shows us what has happened in the patient’s brain, the doctor tries to salvage whatever he can from the damaged site and prevent anything else from being lost, the physicists work on the technology and methodology to gain more information from the patient’s brain for everyone to use. for my research, in a nutshell i assess what a patient can and can’t do (in terms of their language functions), why exactly they can’t do certain things, what this tells us about the organisation of language in the brain and the abilities of the brain to recover from stroke, and how we can recover or retrain the patient’s language. this new knowledge would then be used by the speech therapists to design their rehabilitative therapies and also potentially by doctors researching possible surgical or drug treatments for aphasia. that is the overall goal anyway, and if my research would just run a bit smoother (as if) then it is entirely realistic for me. why is this not of value to “the future of our nation”? why should people be (financially) discouraged from following a career path like mine? it really isn’t an unusual path to take after gaining a psychology degree.

i’m guessing (hoping) that my quoted man wasn’t thinking about all this when he spoke his words. i guess he isn’t really aware of it at all. oh, and i really don’t think that forcing people into certain subjects by pricing the others too high is a good way to go. if you don’t have the passion and interest in your subject then you aren’t going to take it into a career.

right, anger has dissipated now, the argument has tailed off. i’ll put it all in a bubble and blow it away.