My 2nd Journal Club Meeting

After three blogness nights, I feel that it is so hard to get myself to write something. As for Wednesday and Thursday, I was pretty much busy with homework and study for the intermediate microecon quiz on Friday. Nothing significant to talk about but i wouldn't wanna miss blogging about the 2nd journal club meeting held in the lab on Thursday. Before that, I'll just jot down the things the professor wants me to do in the course of this semester - present UROP research in undergraduate conferences, Mednick on Schizophrenia in one of April journal meetings, and reversal learning in a couple of weeks time. To meet that demand, I would have to read tons of journals and books. Sounds scary...am I up to the challenge? Well, I don't think I have a choice but to make it happen.

So this week we have Bleuler as our man. Eugen Bleuler (1857-1939), a Swiss psychiatrist was credited for the introduction of the term "schizophrenia" in 1908 which was known as dementia praecox before that. He was the one who came up with the 4As for schizophrenia symptoms - loose association, inappropriate affect, and autism.

This time we were required to only read 26 pages of the book about him called "The Theory". In that chapter that we were supposed to read, Bleuler talks about the symptoms (sx) of schizophrenia (sz) as consisting of both primary and secondary. Primary sx are the ones that arise directly from the disease itself whereas secondary sx arise only when the patient's already sick condition reacts to the internal and external processes (in other words, indirectly from the primary sx). Apparently, the primary sx are loose associations in which they have lost their meanings and significance, clouded states which revers to catatonia, manic and melancholic episodes, dispositions to hallucinations, some physical sx and tremors. The secondary sx on the other hand are a direct consequence of loosening of the associations.

The descriptions went on and on. Bleuler presented a rather difficult book to analyze and understand. It is pretty vagued and he cited a lot of Freud's and Jung's ideas in his explanations. Poor Andria had a hard time presenting this as there are a lot of things that she as well as most of us do not understand. We struggled with what Bleuler was trying to say with the complexes and there was only so much we could do in such limited time. So, we had to leave it as it is. Next fortnight, we'll have Rodnick and Shakow, whoever they are.