I am Mild to Moderately Depressed, Officially
I learnt about this über cool psychiatrist called Aaron T. Beck and his Cognitive Therapy thing. The students were asked to take a psychological test, as a demonstration of Beck's theory. What was the test about? If the test takers are depressed or not. I have nothing against Beck personally but I have come to believe that these sort of tests are the easiest to fool and thus are not reliable enough. Take the example of the test I took in the morning. The professor told us beforehand that this would judge whether you are depressed or not. By telling this, he made us certain of what we don't want to be - abnormal/different/unhappy/depressed.
Just a digression, How did he make us certain that we don't want to be all/any of the above mentioned things? (This actually is the gist of the post. The answer to the question "Why did Prashant Gautam pelt out another dung bomb?"). He kept calling depressed people abnormal and troubled (he used more sophisticated and politically correct words) before telling us about the test. Then, as he told us about the test, we became sure that we don't want to be abnormal and/or troubled. Why did we do that? Because society does not accept abnormal people. We all want to be accepted. We don't want people talking about us behind our backs and going something like:
A: "you know he is suffering from chronic depression"
B: "what? no wonder he can't sleep"
A: "yeah! poor guy, i hope he doesn't kill himself"
B: "should we help him?"
A: "how can we help him? we don't know what he is going through"
B: "he cribs a lot. is that a symptom of depression?"
A: "could be you know, he might not be happy with things"
B: "i really hate it when he cribs"
A: "last time i talked to him, he called me a liar"
B: "people are like that you know, blaming others for their problems"
A: "you wont believe what i heard.. a certain Mam-gar gave a senior a blow job to be able to drink with him"
B: "what? is that so? wow.. tell me more.. "
so on and so forth..
Now you won't want to be either the depressed person or Mam-gar in that conversation (I can understand depressed, may be because you need sympathy and all, but I cannot comprehend people wanting to be Mam-gar).
You know the reasons why we want to be accepted. So my blathering about it won't make much sense.
Coming back to the test. The test had 24 questions (of which we were supposed to answer first 21 only because may be the last three questioned one's sex life. We were not told what the last three questions were.) and each question had four options with numbers 0,1,2,3 used to index the options (these numbers would serve as score later, as anyone can guess). The questions were not exactly questions and each one was more like fill in the blanks. e.g .
1. I am
(0) not sad
(1) sadder than I used to be
(2) sad most of the time
(3) hateful of my life
and items progressed the same way. Even a 10 year old would have made out the pattern of options. Generalised version of the options would be
(0) I am not depressed
(1) I am mildly depressed
(2) I am moderately depressed
(3) I am the king of the depressed people and committing suicide is my hobby. I don't sleep etc and I hate the guts of people around me. In fact there is a good chance of you irritating me out of my wits by just wishing me.
Now fooling becomes very simple. The person, in front of me, answered all the queries with a 0. He had even answered questions 17,18,19,20,21 when we were supposed to be answering question 7. His final score was 0 and the funny part is there was no category he could be put into. Because for segregation you needed to have a minimum score of 5. He was happy to assume that he is Gautam Budhha himself.
I got 13 on this test, after lying on around 13 occasions.
It actually should not matter that people cheat on these tests, but really it bothers the hell out of me to know that people, just to be accepted, would fuck themselves in the ass. What also bothers me is the fact that I was one of the highest scorers among the students. Filthy liars.
Speaking of liars, I am not sure myself whether I was lying when I marked a (3) or when I marked a (0). There were certain motivations that were guiding me too. I wanted to be true to those motivations. But doesn't this test bring out your motivations? See that's why I didn't like it. It confused me. Bull shit.
Disclaimer: Man there was sense to this post when I thought about it. I will try to summarize it: People are lying bastards, but its not their fault. Society and peer pressure are two things that can make you do anything. So in case we really want to help somebody psychologically, we should come up with more fool proof tests. Something that can catch discrepancies. Now the question that bothers me is.. Why is this fascination with helping people? Can't we just mind our own fucking business. That's what I am going to do now, mind my business. Screw Psychology man. I should get a B at least.
Just a digression, How did he make us certain that we don't want to be all/any of the above mentioned things? (This actually is the gist of the post. The answer to the question "Why did Prashant Gautam pelt out another dung bomb?"). He kept calling depressed people abnormal and troubled (he used more sophisticated and politically correct words) before telling us about the test. Then, as he told us about the test, we became sure that we don't want to be abnormal and/or troubled. Why did we do that? Because society does not accept abnormal people. We all want to be accepted. We don't want people talking about us behind our backs and going something like:
A: "you know he is suffering from chronic depression"
B: "what? no wonder he can't sleep"
A: "yeah! poor guy, i hope he doesn't kill himself"
B: "should we help him?"
A: "how can we help him? we don't know what he is going through"
B: "he cribs a lot. is that a symptom of depression?"
A: "could be you know, he might not be happy with things"
B: "i really hate it when he cribs"
A: "last time i talked to him, he called me a liar"
B: "people are like that you know, blaming others for their problems"
A: "you wont believe what i heard.. a certain Mam-gar gave a senior a blow job to be able to drink with him"
B: "what? is that so? wow.. tell me more.. "
so on and so forth..
Now you won't want to be either the depressed person or Mam-gar in that conversation (I can understand depressed, may be because you need sympathy and all, but I cannot comprehend people wanting to be Mam-gar).
You know the reasons why we want to be accepted. So my blathering about it won't make much sense.
Coming back to the test. The test had 24 questions (of which we were supposed to answer first 21 only because may be the last three questioned one's sex life. We were not told what the last three questions were.) and each question had four options with numbers 0,1,2,3 used to index the options (these numbers would serve as score later, as anyone can guess). The questions were not exactly questions and each one was more like fill in the blanks. e.g .
1. I am
(0) not sad
(1) sadder than I used to be
(2) sad most of the time
(3) hateful of my life
and items progressed the same way. Even a 10 year old would have made out the pattern of options. Generalised version of the options would be
(0) I am not depressed
(1) I am mildly depressed
(2) I am moderately depressed
(3) I am the king of the depressed people and committing suicide is my hobby. I don't sleep etc and I hate the guts of people around me. In fact there is a good chance of you irritating me out of my wits by just wishing me.
Now fooling becomes very simple. The person, in front of me, answered all the queries with a 0. He had even answered questions 17,18,19,20,21 when we were supposed to be answering question 7. His final score was 0 and the funny part is there was no category he could be put into. Because for segregation you needed to have a minimum score of 5. He was happy to assume that he is Gautam Budhha himself.
I got 13 on this test, after lying on around 13 occasions.
It actually should not matter that people cheat on these tests, but really it bothers the hell out of me to know that people, just to be accepted, would fuck themselves in the ass. What also bothers me is the fact that I was one of the highest scorers among the students. Filthy liars.
Speaking of liars, I am not sure myself whether I was lying when I marked a (3) or when I marked a (0). There were certain motivations that were guiding me too. I wanted to be true to those motivations. But doesn't this test bring out your motivations? See that's why I didn't like it. It confused me. Bull shit.
Disclaimer: Man there was sense to this post when I thought about it. I will try to summarize it: People are lying bastards, but its not their fault. Society and peer pressure are two things that can make you do anything. So in case we really want to help somebody psychologically, we should come up with more fool proof tests. Something that can catch discrepancies. Now the question that bothers me is.. Why is this fascination with helping people? Can't we just mind our own fucking business. That's what I am going to do now, mind my business. Screw Psychology man. I should get a B at least.
posted by Prashant Gautam at 3:04 PM
5 Comments:
I love you man - and wholeheartedly agree on it being incomprehensible that someone should want to become a Mam-gar .
As forthe test- i would have gone all (4) just to see the result :)
at both Johnny and Soham
When will you stop commenting on blogs just because you want to show that you have read the post?
There was more to this post than stupid Mam-gar. It just flashed my mind and I typed it. Has no meaning whatsoever.
Talking about porn and sex is not always funny. Sometimes its immature.
Abusing is most effective when you really mean to abuse. Not when you just want to fill the gaps to make it sound funny/cool.
I don't understand the use of the word "objectivization" (means to cause to become concrete or objective; objectify.) here. Psychological tests are not meant to be objective. At most one can inter-relate the questions so that discrepancies can be caught. There are no right or wrong answers.
Men, your words are losing meaning.
But then as Johnny rightly said, "You (that means me, PG) are mildly depressed and thus prone to getting irritated at the drop of a hat. Continue this way and you would end up being severely depressed."
(I have great pain inflicting friends.)
My Reply: "I seek isolation"
This comment could have been a post in itself.
I love you too Soham dude. Thanks for the kind words.
I am acting like a prick, but I really hope that someday we get over this notion of being/sounding/appearing cool in the most cliched sense of the word. Most of the people, would accuse me of being a perpetrator of such notions. Of course you have the right to your opinions and you can throw stones at me. But not all of you, please.
chal yaar tu keheta hai to fir.....
Ya man... get well soon.
what's this all going?
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