Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

The BPS runs a public lecture in connection with Mental Health Day which this year was last Friday and, as always, it’s fascinating.

This year kicked off with an interesting lecture on preventing psychosis by trying to identify At Risk Mental states before psychosis actually develops which seems a very sensible approach. So far it’s not been entirely successful or rather has apparently not been as successful as they would like. Among many problems in the area is that having an at risk mental state does not guarantee that you’ll go on to develop psychosis but combine that with an environment where you are exposed to other psychotic individuals (e.g. in the family) and it’s a lot more likely. Also, there’s the “problem” that once they’ve identified people at risk, they tend to go directly to interventions and therefore in a number of cases they’re succeeding by stopping the psychosis early (and stopping it early is key). So, overall, the direct figures seem unlikely to ever look good and it would seem that it will be the statistics that’ll show the results.

Next up was a lecture looking at the impact of trauma caused by the troubles in NI on psychosis. You might think that this would be easy to identify but in practice it’s incredibly difficult for a whole range of factors. For one thing, those remaining in the troubled areas ended up getting a lot of community support and solidarity so tended to have less in the way of psychosis than you would expect. In contrast, those who moved out of those areas had more psychosis apparently due to the upheaval and the lack of cohesion in the communities in which they ended up.

They finished with two lectures by people who have experienced psychosis directly. The first lady gave quite a moving talk on how not accepting that she had a psychosis made life much more difficult for her and her family than it might have been if she had acknowledged that she was bipolar at the start. To me though, it was the final talk that was by far the most impressive. It was by a guy who frankly would have been considered a total psycho but I think that it would be unusual if he’d not reached that point given the childhood experiences that he had to work through. However, he did work through those experiences and was lucky enough to eventually get proper treatment for his illness which is keeping his psychosis at bay and seems to have eliminated his former (understandable) tendencies to violence. He showed very clearly that early diagnosis is a major advantage not only to the psychotic individual but to those that they come in contact with.

Well, it’s all over. That’s the final exam for my Life Sciences degree too and I’m already wondering how I’ll get through life without biology to make it interesting.

The report question turned out to be a doddle and was pretty much exactly what I had expected so it was a doddle to do and my figures fitted in with it quite well too. A fairly easy 20-25% I think.

Next I did the data handling question which was entirely public health though, as usual with these questions, you could have had a good stab at it without having done the course. Based on a norovirus infection this year and looking at some trends and why school kids would catch it. Another easy 20-25% I think.

Finally there were the short answer questions. Ten from twelve and as usual from all over the course. It was easy enough to choose the first five or six and easy to eliminate two (did anyone do the two ten part ones?). In practice, there turned out to be several easy ones in my second choice group when I looked at the in more detail. I’m not so sure of the overall marks on this section which is a pity as it’s the section that largely determines the overall grade.

It felt like quite a reasonable paper apart from the two ten part questions which I suspect few will have answered.

As the Infectious Disease course is the last one for my Life Sciences degree, I thought I’d beef up the amount of dedicated revision time that I had for it.

That means that I’m a full-time student for the next week.

It doesn’t mean that I’ll be doing 12 hours a day revision mind you as my brain tends to run out after a while. The basic game plan is to drop the kids off and head on somewhere quiet where I’ll be able to do several 45-60 minute stretches before lunch, another slot after lunch and one or perhaps two after I pick them up again.

In principle, that should leave me with loads of time to do it all but the problem is that there’s loads to be done. My notes are 30 pages, I’ve another 10 of detailed diagrams, the glossary runs to 50 pages and so does the Q&A. Not to be forgotten is the research question which has oodles of studies though I’ll likely limit myself to 10-20 pages of reading for it. Having said that, I’ll only be skimming the glossary and Q&A so in reality it’s the 40 pages of notes and diagrams plus the 10-20 of the research question which doesn’t sound so bad but every one of them is very information rich.

One other complication is that for the answer to the research question you need to have two diagrams or tables and I’ve not yet seen any doable ones for it.

Over the weekend, I managed to complete phase one of my revision for the exam next week. That entailed finishing off the notes for the final book of the course so now it’s onwards to the next stage of the revision.

First up this week is a look at the research question and gathering together the information that I think will be required to answer it. I’m also going to have a look at the three examples of this type of question that I have from the specimen exam paper and the two past papers. I’m not going to look at them in a whole lot of detail though – just enough to get a feel for what kind of questions might come up.

Next up  is a look at the specimen exam paper I think with a view to ensuring that the notes that I have are sufficient to answer the majority of the questions. I say “the majority” rather than all as, although clearly being able to answer all would be better, I’ve not looked at any of the papers yet so I don’t now how viable it is to know everything that might be necessary. In parallel with that I’ll be going over the notes that I have at the moment and adding bits & pieces to them as necessary to answer the questions on the specimen exam and, later, on the two past papers that are available.

Then there’s an assortment of information to glance at which includes the 50 pages of the glossary, an equally chunky FAQ and a number of diagrams on topics that one of the other students produced this year. I’ll probably confine my revision of the case studies to those diagrams as I don’t think I will be able to slot in the time to go over them fully and I don’t think it’s necessary anyway.

After that, it’s some serious going over the notes that I’ve produced over the last month or so in the hope that enough of it will stick to answer ten of the short questions and any required background for the data handling question.

Early days for this, but given the experience of ED209, I plan to start early.

Exloring Psychology (DSE212) formally starts in a couple of weeks but I’ve been reading the texts for a while now in teabreaks and I’m about a month ahead with the reading at the moment. That said, there are also other non-textbook items to look at including the workbook (not too onerous so far), assorted videos (some of which were in the Coursera psych course last year) and a number of audio recordings. In terms of volume of work, it seems less than SK320 but there are six full-size TMAs to be done, albeit with a spare week for each, of which the first is due the first week in November.

I’m hoping to do my ED209 style notes for this as I go along but we’ll see how the time works out with that idea. Tim’s notes aren’t great for DSE212 as they were for an earlier version of the course and he hadn’t really gotten into gear with his note writing then but David’s DSE212 toolkit looks reasonable, if rather large (it runs to around 250 pages!). I’ll be aiming for something in the middle ground.

At the moment, my plan is to run up notes as I get through each chapter as I did for ED209 and produce the overall guide like the ED209 one along with the ED209 PDF style notes.