A Beautiful Mind

Dear blog,

Again, here's a really boring post with nothing really interesting in particular.

I'm currently on the Brain and Mind rotation aka Neurology and Psychiatry. Wondering why they put the 2 extremes together. On Mondays, I have to go to Southport for Psychiatric placement. It's so far away. Takes me about 1.5 hours to get there. So, 3 hours of travelling on that day itself. When I'm lucky, there will be patients who will want to talk to you, so, I can get a decent history at that time. Other days, it's either the patients are asleep or too depressed to talk to anyone.

The experience on the Psychiatric wards have really opened my eyes. Initially, my views about mental illness was that the patient will be very dangerous, scary, maybe a psychotic killer, who needs to be tied up and locked in a room harm proof with walls which are cushioned to prevent injuries from banging against them etc. But no. The patients which I saw were mostly depressed patients who had gone through a significant mental trauma which brought about their illness. There are other types of presentation as well like drug abuse caused hallucination etc.
Hearing descriptions of hallucinations are really scary. Like seeing a guy who doesn't have eyes but only 2 black holes in the orbits which keeps on harassing you to go with him. Or, hearing voices commenting on your every move, or forcing you to kill someone every single day. I seriously cannot imagine how these patients have to cope with all these each and every day.

One famous movie based on schizophrenia is 'A Beautiful Mind'. However, after doing PBL on schizophrenia, I realised that the John Nash's presentation was not the typical presentation. He had delusion of reference where he thought that the secret agent was asking for his help and that there were secret messages encoded in news articles directed to him. Rarely, visual hallucinations are presented in schizophrenia like the main actor. He was lucky that toward the end where his wife almost left him that he realised that the 3 character which he saw were unreal. This clearly illustrates the lack of insight for patients suffering from this condition.
My conclusion from this is, watching movies has their benefit as long as you can interpret and use it wisely.

Other than that, I'm really looking forward to Liverpool Malaysian Night 08 and my trip to Dublin in Easter. Of course, I'm looking forward to PL and BT's visit to Liverpool this coming weekend. Really can't wait for the holidays. It's been really long since the ski trip.

There are 2 big bruises on both knees now as I had to kneel down really quickly for both the Chinese fan dance and Indian Banghra dance. At least the pain went away after a day of resting. What I can say now is, I do hope that the response will be good and everything will go smoothly. Can't wait to retire from the society completely as well cause the whole year of extra work is really causing a strain on me.

Lots of homework to do, continuing the search for motivation, loads of assignments piling up, exams to prepare for. So many things to do in these 3 months before I can go back to Malaysia and be pampered by my parents after 2 years! I don't know how did I survive so long without seeing them but I guess you do get used to it. I am so not looking forward to the separation in August. Haih. That's the main reason why I didn't want to go back last summer.