Am I Normal?

Reference:

Murphy Paul, A. (2005, Mar/Apr). Am I Normal? Psychology Today. Last Retrieved Jan 24, 2009, from
http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-3707.html


Summary:

In this article,” Am I Normal”, the writer discusses the fact that some people have some personality disorder traits. Some of them are very sensitive, and want to get the attention of people around them in their family or job. When we communicate with them, we will think those are un normal. The writer gave an example of a lady who was suffering with her associates' work. She had a histrionic personality: sensitive, impulsive and wanting to get all the people’s attention. She had many problems with people, then she got thrown out of her job. She was depressed. When she visited a psychologist, she learned that she had a personality disorder. There are many like her. The result of some survey is one to seven people have a personality disorder. We think that some of our behaviors are normal, but the fact that just the psychologist will diagnose it is not normal.

Reaction:

My major is a psychology, so I'm really interested in reading about our personality and knowing what is normal and what is not. I like to know a lot about people’s personality and how I can have good communication with them if they are suffering with some kind of abnormal behavior.

I already know about this information and I have good experience with how I can diagnose the personalities. I worked in a hospital, as a psychologist with my supervisor. I worked with a lot of patients: adults and kids. Also I did many personality tests and I.Q tests. I agree with the writer, because I had a lot of patients who were suffering with their personalities. Some of them spent their lives with many jobs and communication problems, but they never knew why that happened with them. In addition, their families also felt bad because they couldn't get a good way to help them or understand their strange behaviors. When I tried to help them it was very hard, because I had to work with their personality traits not with their behaviors.

In my country, we can see some of them in our family or in work and people usually thought they are crazy people, but that is not true, so I have to let those people know what these personalities are and what they feel and why they do this. Also some media try to change people’s impression about them and I hope that helps those people to feel comfortable with society.