The Blacklist is an interesting thriller that focuses on capturing the most dangerous and wanted criminals in the world with the help of a former US Navy officer who is now a high-profile criminal, Raymond Reddington.  All the episodes are named after the serial number given to each criminal. The episode I would like to discuss today is No. 104 – Lord Baltimore. This episode explains an important disorder that we have studied under personality disorders, that is, disociative identity disorder. It is the only episode in the whole series that explicitly shows the symptoms of a personality disorder. In this episode, a woman named Nora Mills is suspected of being the so-called ‘Lord Baltimore’, but strangely enough, she is not aware of this. She also shows other forms of behaviour that she is unaware of. When taken back to Nora’s past, we see that she had a twin sister named Rowan Mills. Rowan was a happy, outgoing and well-adjusted child while on the other hand No...

13 Reasons Why Kashika Gokhale  Exam Bonus  Warning: This article contains certain spoilers regarding the show 13 Reasons Why 13 Reasons why revolves around an unhappy teenager who tries dealing with daily hassles and traumas in her life. When I first studied psychology in school, our textbook mentioned how daily hassles can cause extreme stress which may lead to a tipping point most of the class what this could be. What many of us didn’t realize at the time was that several studies have shown an association between school, bullying, depression, and suicidality among teens. Unfortunately, bullying and depression are not isolated events but something that is extremely in common for most teens to experience these days.  The series tells the story of Hannah Baker, who commits suicide before the series opens. She then sent out audio tapes providing 13 reasons of why she did it and the people responsible for her wanting to take her life. These reasons include rape...

Aaina Singh (Overall Bonus) The PBS documentary I chose to watch for this blog post is titled “Living with Bipolar Disorder” (see link attached below) and it’s a conversation between American screenwriter & director Paul Dalio – who has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and clinical psychologist Dr. Jeffrey Borenstein, MD for a television series called Healthy Minds. I chose to watch it initially out of sheer curiosity about what goes on in the mind of a person with Bipolar disorder but it actually ended up raising some intriguing questions in my mind about the perception of the disorder and its relationship with creativity and artistic ability. The conversation between Borenstein and Dalio started off with them talking about his movie Touched with Fire, which is a story about two people with bipolar who fall in love with each other at a medical care facility. Borenstein asked Dalio what he felt about making a movie so gravely connected with his own life and experie...

Ananya Iyer For exam points The claim that “sheher tumhe paagal bana dega” (”the city will drive you mad”) is one that has been made cliché by its use casually and clinically, by grandmothers and researchers, alike. The origin of this statement and its validity to a layman seems apparent, it lies in the aesthetic of “hectic”, “crowded” cities as opposed to be “calm”, “serene” villages. In terms of psychology, there have been numerous studies that ascribed causality or aggravation of mental disorders, especially schizophrenia, to cities. However, the factors that contribute to this causality in some cases, prove to be generalized or warped. Since there are a large plethora of elements that can contribute to the onset of psychotic symptoms and schizophrenia, it is understandably difficult for the researcher to control all these elements in a study of schizophrenia, which may then affect that statistics and conclusions of the experiment. Factors such as migration patte...

Remedial for overall Innocent Until Coerced As I was looking for an article to write my blog post on, I stumbled across an article titled, Innocent people don't confess and they don't plead guilty. The article is based on the serial killer William Heirans, dubbed the Lipstick Killer. He confessed to committing three murders, however, the author is unsure about whether or not he did commit the murder. The article talks about how almost one out of every fourth case consists of a person who was falsely convicted because they falsely confessed at the time. It is usually a trend that the guilty party never confesses to their crime. Then what pushes an innocent person to confess that they are guilty? Some people do it for the attention and others do it because they convince themselves that they are guilty. However, more often than not the victim is coerced into confessing to the crime. This especially happens when the victims can be easily influenced (in the case of adolesce...

Ananya Sood Remedial for Exam The psychological analysis of Cholly Breedlove from Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye  Easily one of the most impactful yet scarring novels of the 1970's, The Bluest Eye paints an explicit and horrifying image of the experiences of the African American race after the period of slavery. Toni Morrison authors this eye-opening piece of literature and takes us to the world of suffering and damage caused by racial segregation. Morrison sets this novel with children at its very core, surrounded by adults who constantly neglect them. A psychoanalytical viewpoint can be used to understand the character of Cholly Breedlove. This viewpoint psychologically analyses Cholly’s actions and connects them to his past and the problems in his upbringing. This point of view of analysis was first coined by Sigmund Freud, who said that psychoanalytic is a theory of personality organization and a person can only be cured if they can make their unconsciou...