Blackout

Just finished reading John Lescroart's Betrayal (at 1 a.m. this morning, but compulsive reading is another subject for another day). In it, a defendant has no memory for the time of the crime. The defense attorney's handling of this problem is a bit muddled.

He hopes to get in Posttraumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD) as the explanation for the gap in memory. In a preliminary hearing, a psychiatrist with expertise in PTSD testifies that flashback-related blackouts last only a few minutes (pp. 211-217). My quibble with this is that these experiences are not technically "blackouts" at all, but dissociative episodes. The person is fully conscious, but not really present because they are re-experiencing events from another time and another place. Most likely, they will remember the content of the flashback, but not necessarily what they said or did, or what other people said or did, while they were having it. It is in that sense that it is a blackout, in that the information they forgot was never recorded in the first place, and this is why it cannot be recalled.

During the trial, the evidence proffered is that an old head injury is the cause (pp. 274-279). Unfortunately for the defense, a neurologist testifies that brain injuries do not account for extended periods of unconsciousness (after the initial trauma, that is) and the defendant has four days to account for. Not to mention that his blood alcohol at the time of his arrest shows clearly that he'd been wide awake and drinking like a fish for goodly portions of the days in question. Here the problem is that, once again, "blackout" as a term is being used by the attorney to mean one thing, and by the expert to mean another.

The defense attorney recognizes this little problem in mid-testimony and gives up on this witness, when another question or two would have established that "blackout" is not synonymous with "unconsciousness." Indeed, testimony from a VA staffer is available to show that, while still in the hospital, the defendant had experienced an episode during which he was fully awake but thought he was still in Iraq: He remembered nothing of this afterward (pp. 226-228).

And then I must have had some kind of blackout, because I started this blog entry over two months ago and never published it. I found it when I decided to write a little scribble on memory in general, and was checking to see if I'd done that already!

I have no idea any more how I intended to finish it, so here it is, as is. Scary.

This is Io

Io will be accompanying me to the office most days, beginning the first of January. Mr. Wood and I adopted her a few weeks ago from the Atlanta Humane Society. She may be a Flat Coated Retriever mix, although there has been some difference of opinion on that. She is two years old, well-mannered although you could not say "trained," and has the sweetest disposition. She is shy at first, but once she gets to know you, very affectionate.

She is named after the Greek goddess, and it's pronounced "eye-oh".

She and I went by the office today to feed Larry Bird, post yesterday's deposits, and pay this month's tax bill. This was her first visit to the office, and she went straight for the Rescue Dog toy a client had brought in after 9/11 for Rosie. Io loves stuffed-animal-type toys!

From there, we went to the bank and the post office, and as you can see it was a tiring day.

Participated in the biennial ritual of license renewal. It is now legal for me to practice in the state of Georgia in 2009-2010.

It's good to be back.

How I spent my vacation

Claire Potter, over at Tenured Radical, turned me on to Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin, by Alice Echols when I put the word out a couple of weeks ago that I needed someone I could use as a model for my Personality students to follow in writing their papers. I'm about halfway through, and loving it. Janis's debut album, Cheap Thrills, came out when I was 16, and she had a helluva influence on me. Broke my heart when she died.

I anticipated that I would be able to mine her life for some good psychoanalytical stuff for the Theories class, but after that, I worried that there wouldn't be good material. My first surprise was what a hard worker she was: There's some good Trait Theory stuff to be mined there--not only Conscientiousness, but also Neurosis and Openness (to Experience). But the real surprise is the cultural angle: She was a Boomer, of course, so before she was in the thick of things in the Haight, she'd had that whole 50s-suburban-middle-class-nuclear-family-upbringing thing going on. And of course Big Brother was one of the original San Francisco bands, so she was turning pro just as everybody out there was going psychedelic and plugging in. The cultural angle shouldn't be a surprise, but being a late Boomer myself and having come of age in the 60s, I tend to forget what a revolutionary experience that would have been for her.

In other words, to my amazement, I am less than halfway through the book and have three sets of theories I can apply to Janis's life to teach my class

1. how to use theory to explain a real human being,
   
2. how to find relevant empirical literature, and
   
3. how to pull it together for a paper.

And it's such a fun read! Some of the history I knew of course, having lived through it, but some of it was before my time, so the book has been providing some fascinating background to my own adolescence.

Thanks, Dr. Potter!

Dr. Wood on vacation

• Fog drifts through the woods from the river, blanketing my sister's horse pasture in soft, gray light and shadow.
• I woke up during the night to find my bed co-occupied by two cats and a 95-lb. Labrador Retriever.
• Went to the bookstore yesterday to watch my niece work and was thrilled to see three copies of Shreve's book on the shelf!
  

So Whudja Think?

I'm loving the discussions on discussions in the blogosphere of late. Sisyphus (who is actually a cat, but never mind) over at Academic Cog started it. When you get done with that, read Dr. Crazy's response at Reassigned Time.

I am not nearly as intellectual as either of these ladies, so my classroom discussions tend to begin with, "So whudja think?" But like Crazy said in her comment,

"I definitely have an agenda for what I want them to get from the texts that I assign, but I think that the best discussions happen when I'm not terribly controlling in my methods for getting students there."

Before we go anywhere else, I want to find out where the class is at with the assigned reading. Sometimes they have a better idea than I did about where to go with it. Sometimes I find out up front that they didn't even get it, so some explaining is in order before we try to discuss. But I always start with their initial, gut reactions to the thing.

We have to get past that, though. I want them to do in class (and in their reaction papers) more. In ethics, there are, obviously, some clear Rights and Wrongs. You don't have sex with a client. That would be a clear Wrong. But some things are fuzzy, and some things in the ethical code conflict. And some things haven't been sorted out by the experts yet. For example, some say we should never mix the therapeutic and forensic roles. Others say that separation is neither possible nor practical. So how do we as practitioners handle that? I want them to be able to cite cases from licensing board and ethics committee proceedings, the Code itself, and case law to support their arguments. I want them to be able to cite commentators' opinions and research findings when they are available. And finally, I want them to be able to consult with colleagues and document their ultimate decisions as to a course of action.

But Sisyphus complains that "the refusal or just plain inability to dig your fingers into the guts of the text and mush things around is prevalent in my class right now,"and there is some of that in my class as well. Indeed, my students occasionally express frustration that the Code and its commentators don't just tell them what to do! They even accuse people who grapple with ethical issues of the sin of ethical relativism, apparently on the theory that "everybody" already "knows" (or should know) Right from Wrong. I want these folk to come to understand, over the course of the semester, that part of what makes psychology a profession (as opposed to a technical field) is that there isn't just a manual that you can follow, that the work requires sometimes difficult judgments.

I came to teaching in general (and to discussion in particular) with more clinical than academic experience. As I have noted previously, the Georgia School of Professional Psychology was oriented toward clinical practice, not research and teaching. So I never had the opportunity to TA with the professor I most admired, and we had no undergraduate program to practice on either. What I did know how to do was group therapy, and I brought some of those skills (e.g., getting people to talk to each other, not the group leader) to the classroom. And that did give me a good start. It feels natural to me: I don't agonize over it they way I do over my lectures in my Personality classes. (I've never given birth to an infant, but I imagine the process is somewhat similar.)

Classrooms are also similar to groups in that, while you want members of each to be talking to each other more than they do to you, you also must still remain in charge. You have to keep people on task. You can't let someone become a scapegoat for the rest of the group. And as Crazy noted, you can't be afraid of silence. Group therapy is not performance art: Members can't come to group expecting you to 'do them some therapy.' They have to bring something to the table. It is similar with students, at least in ethics class: You can't just lecture people on ethics. That's not how people learn to be ethical. They have to engage with the issues. So if they aren't, you can't be afraid to just sit there until somebody pipes up. I learned a long time ago as a group therapist that nobody can stand it longer than one minute: Try it yourself. Count off 60 seconds in your head next time you find yourself doing all the work and see if somebody doesn't start something before you make it to 60. Works every time.

What I'm still learning is how to be "explicit about how what we do in class... connects to what they do when they read, what I expect of them on writing assignments, and what they do on tests." My Personality classes have been totally at sea on how to use empirical articles to examine a public figure's personality, and my Ethics students tend to write reaction papers that are just that: their reactions. No processing at all.

Crazy's post made me see the obvious: That not only have I got to do this 'make explicit' thing more than I have been in class discussion, but also in instructions for assignments, study guides, and even in my lectures. For next semester's Personality class, I'd already picked one public person (just like they will use for their case study/term paper) to follow all the way through the course, using research and theory to explain her as well as using her to demonstrate theory and research. Before, my choice of examples from one class session to the next was pretty random, and they haven't been 'getting' how to do their papers because of it. Now in addition to using a better class of example, I know I have to lay out for them how to use that example.