As I've mentioned before, I'm a psychology major at my university.

So far my two major courses this semester are Abnormal Psychology (Study of abnormal behavior...duh - like schizophrenia; personality, axiety, mood, sexual, dilusional disorders) and Clinical Psychology (Study of how to treat abnormal behavior/disorders).

They're tough classes, but I hate to admit, interesting.

Anyways, I was just thinking about how all of this information I am learning really opens your eyes. For instance, I just finished learning about ADHD and how it affects people and what the effects are. It suddenly occured to me that a friend of mine may have ADHD.

For years my friend has been a pretty poor student, nice guy and funny, but kinda wacko. I always just wrote it off as him just being kinda kooky, but now I feel as though he might have had a mental disorder and no-one really noticed.

For instance, one sign of ADHD in children is low motor coordination, especially in handwriting.

Now we all have our "bad" handwriting, so I just thought he was a messy guy, but i realized that his handwriting has been horrendous since kindergarden. It's completely ineligible.

Plus, he was one of those can't keep still EVER, again, i thought it was cause he was drinking too much Mt. Dew (drank it ALL the time). But he would be like that all the time, even at like 4:00 in the morning. Loud and crazy (in the silly sort of way). He also sometimes had massive self-esteem problems. He constantly put himself down and say he wasn't good enough to do this or that.

My point is, hind sight, I'm noticing a lot of things lately that I never thought about.

For instance, I've realized that I had depression a couple years back. I had just broken up with my g/f and I remember the summer following (it was right before summer) i didn't do anytthing. Nada. Zilch. Zip. I slept about 18 hours a day, didn't do anything I liked. I also had mad weight fluxuations, I gained about 30 pounds, and then that 30 pounds, all in the span of 3 months.

I know you're all thinking "well duuuh....of course that's depression.) But obviously, no one around me noticed enough to get me help. I eventually got over it in about a year. I made varsity golf team, started doing some community service (which made me feel better and kept me active), eventually I got back to normal.

But how much better it would have been to have had help and not have had to struggle on my own for a year. Sort of makes me upset that someone didn't notice, would've saved myself a youthful summer I won't have back.

Sometimes I wonder if I suffer from a bi-polar depression, I feel top of the world, like nothing can stop me, and then sometimes I feel like a worthless hunk of meat within a short time. But it doesn't happen commonly, so it's probably just the regular ups and downs.

After saying all of that, I probably should take my own advice and get screened

Edited by - Sylverfysh on 9/26/2005 2:18:54 PM