A question for you Psychologists

[incognito]

Hi, i notice that there quite a few people on here, that have studied Psychology. I'm just wondering if its helped them to understand "SA", and to understand themselves better?? Or even has it been unhelpfull??

Incog

[Amber Fyre]

Well studying psychology is how I found out what 'SA' is in the first place. So in that sense it was helpful.
Other than that, you don't really study SA on psychology courses. I did A-Level psychology followed by an undergraduate degree in psychology, and we never covered it. I saw it in a few of the textbooks, usually a single paragraph, but they never taught us about it. We briefly in my degree touched on depression and general anxiety disorder, but that's as close as it came.
I think a lot of people are interested in psychology because they think it will help to get to know themselves better. I don't think it does really. Pop psychology does perhaps, but in the education system you spend more time learning about statistics and biology than you do about why you think the way that you do. There are a few useful things you can learn, especially in developmental psychology, about why people can turn out certain ways.

[IRIS]

^ nah it was crap and boring and we mostly got taught archaic theories. Psychiatry may have giving an insight but psychology, pants.

[Narwhal]

I found it helpful because at the time we were studying depression and anxiety disorders I was able to diagnose myself! (I studied it at A Level btw)

[rekrul]

I have read quite a bit about the psychology of SA, depression and happiness.
It has help a lot in my understanding and a fair bit in my progress, but as Morpheus says "sooner or later you're going to realize just as I did that there's a difference between knowing the path and walking the path. "

[G-1]

I did a few years of a psychology degree, and none of it was concerned with anxiety at all, just past research and children.

[Holz]

Like other people have said, I heard about SA through studying psychology at A-level. I've told this story before but it was completely by chance that in the 'introduction to AS psychology' booklet they gave us right at the start of college, there was a list of phobias. One of those was "social phobia - fear of embarrassment in public" and I thought "That's me". I researched it a bit more, and now 2 years on here I am.

Other than that we vaguely mentioned it in A2 when we talked about anxiety disorders, but it was one of three of the anxiety disorders listed, which we barely touched on, and my teacher made no reference to SA at all. I was almost hoping she would ask people what it was just to see people's reactions. Although at one other point she mentioned that for some people "going to the shops will be really difficult for them" or something to that effect, which was met by a few stupid comments, but hey. To be honest I always found the descriptions in text books etc to be far too vague and generalising, which kind of makes me think about how I see other illnesses.

I'm doing a counselling course now and already, 2 weeks in, we've mentioned more on it than in 2 years of A level psychology.

[hardy]

Well I didnt do a course on it but working in a University I have access to any books I want . So i learnt quite a bit.
However a big frustration is the fact that such books are usually written for "normal" people so they assume that the reader has had a normal life and therefore certain things are taken for granted without explanation.

for example the phrase such as "when talking to ones friends" makes the assumption that the reader HAS friends. ( wheras an SA person may not)

[panoply]

probably not, i believe they know very little, psychologists are about as usuful as a paper bucket

[Everleigh]

yes im the same as a few ppl here, who studied it at uni and thats how i found out about my own issues-i self diagnosed. Unfortuantely tho, clinical psychology was only briefly touched on in the psychology degree i studied- as it is in most courses. We did a few weeks on clinical psychology and touched on the array of mental disorders and somewhere in there was a brief mention of SA being one of five major anxiety disorders. But that was it really. the rest of the time we learnt a wide range of psychology areas such as memory, cognition, perception, developmental studies and language, social psychology such as racism, stereotyping etc, and of course stats, stats and more stats!! So it has not helped a great deal, the more interpersonal relations side of psychology and clinical skills/mental illness is not touched on until u do post grad. One thing that was interesting tho was in behvaiourism we learned about 'learnt helplessness' and 'external and internal locus of control' and how these things often affect ppl with depression. it gave me insight into myself and i realised i def have external locus of control which is common among ppl with depression.

i added some info on external/internal locus of control from wikipedia if anyones interested.....?!

Locus of control is a term in psychology which refers to a person's belief about what causes the good or bad results in his or her life, either in general or in a specific area such as health or academics........

Locus of control refers to the extent to which individuals believe that they can control events that affect them. Individuals with a high internal locus of control believe that events result primarily from their own behavior and actions. Those with a high external locus of control believe that powerful others, fate, or chance primarily determine events.One's "locus" (Latin for "place" or "location") can either be internal (meaning the person believes that they control their life) or external (meaning they believe that their environment, some higher power, or other people control their decisions and their life).


....Internals tend to attribute outcomes of events to their own control. Externals attribute outcomes of events to external circumstances. For example, college students with a strong internal locus of control may believe that their grades were achieved through their own abilities and efforts, whereas those with a strong external locus of control may believe that their grades are the result of good or bad luck, or to a professor who designs bad tests or grades capriciously; hence, they are less likely to expect that their own efforts will result in success and are therefore less likely to work hard for high grades. (It should not be thought however, that internality is linked exclusively with attribution to effort and externality with attribution to luck, as Weiner's work (see below) makes clear). This has obvious implications for differences between internals and externals in terms of their achievement motivation, suggesting that internal locus is linked with higher levels of N-ach. Due to their locating control outside themselves, externals tend to feel they have less control over their fate. People with an external locus of control tend to be more stressed and prone to clinical depression (Benassi, Sweeney & Dufour, 1988; cited in Maltby, Day & Macaskill, 2007).

It sucks really as if it was not for all my own issues, i wld hav like to hav been a clinical psychologists as i find it really interesting as a subject to study.

[hardy]

One thing I have found recently .Yes there is frustratingly little in the pyschology /sociology literature about SA . However since Sa is about problems relating to "normal" people then the study of psychology can be very helpful in helping you to understand normal people.
In particular i learnt that the average person doesn't use logic very much in their daily lives ( they just pretend they do ) . Most of what they say and do is based on what society tells them is the right thing to say or do. You might say this is wrong because people have different opinions but its really that people just vary a bit in the subgroups that they belong to.

[VO2]

The answer for me, is a definite yes . And it came about when I was studying anxiety and the neurobiological aspects relating to it. I came to realize that panic attacks, and the rest of it, were a lot harder than I thought to bring under control.

Before that I use to beat myself up, and accuse myself of irrational cowardness, when I couldn’t manage a social situation which provoked lots of anxiety etc.