User:Stephenmhogan

=Analytical Writing=

Personal Essay
Temazepam. Paroxetine. Citalopram. Triazolam. Zolpidem. Dichloralphenazone. Bupropion. Venlafaxine. Isometheptene. Quetiapine. Lamotrigine.

To most people, none of these words have any meaning. It usually takes a few moments of study before anyone can even make an attempt at pronouncing any of them. It is understandable, as they don’t exactly look like they have been written in English. Even after the word has been said, it means nothing to them. No memory is evoked. No emotional response is elicited. The only thought generated has to do with Scrabble. To most people, those words are merely collections of letters.

To me, these words mean a great deal. They are the names of some of the drugs that were prescribed to me at one point or another by doctors and psychiatrists for psychological disorders I was diagnosed with. I'm not entirely convinced that I truly suffered from everything that appears on my medical records. To save you from a story that can be exhaustingly long, I shall provide the Cliffs Note's version. I was having trouble sleeping and was diagnosed with insomnia. The medication I was given stopped working after a little while, so the doctors looked for an underlying cause of my insomnia and came to the conclusion that I had depression. After a few months of unsuccessful treatment for depression, this diagnosis was snowballed into a diagnosis for type two bipolar disorder. Treatment for this also did not go so well. Most people don't know this, but if you are diagnosed with multiple psychological disorders, you get to play a game called Find the Effective Treatment. Here are the rules: Each diagnosis comes with its own set of prescriptions. Each prescription has its own unique set of side effects. These side effects can look and sound an awful lot like symptoms for other disorders. To make matters even more fun, these drugs can interact with each other in unexpected ways. The goal is to effectively control all symptoms of all disorders. I got pretty into this game. At one point I was taking five prescriptions daily: two for insomnia, two for depression, and one for bipolar disorder. Not to mention the prescription to treat the migraines that I started getting at an ever-increasing frequency. My memory of this time in my life is a bit hazy. I started to feel weird all the time. I was irritable a lot. I had trouble remembering things. I lost a lot of weight. My kidneys hurt. Thoughts that seemed clear made no sense upon later reflection. I was confused all the time, unsure if I had actually done things or just thought about doing them. I had trouble understanding what people were talking about sometimes. I had an addiction to one of my sleeping pills. Non-specific symptoms of paranoia and schizophrenia started to manifest. Each round of new drugs presented different problems, but one thing was consistent: I was a mess. So I stopped playing the game. Now everything is okay. I'm not taking any prescriptions. I don't keep track of any symptoms. I don't worry about side effects. I feel fine. None of the drugs cured me, and I only started to feel better when I stopped taking them. So how did I, someone who is doing just fine on my own, end up on so many pills? I believed I was suffering from the disorders at the time, since the symptoms were present, but where did these symptoms come from? Maybe I truly have the disorders and all symptoms are latent at the moment. Maybe the symptoms were side effects from the drugs. Maybe I only displayed the symptoms because I was aware of them and expected them to be present. After all, I was told by a professional that I had these disorders, so who am I to question that? I mean, I don't have a piece of paper saying that I know a lot about medicine and mental disorders. So how did this happen? And how many other people out there are taking pills they don't actually need to treat disorders they were told they have?

I think we as a culture have invested too much confidence in modern medicine. You can turn on a television at any time of the day and see ads for pills that will make you happier, enlarge your penis, and regrow your hair. As a culture, we have accepted these pills as solutions for problems in our lives. In reality, these problems are only problems if the individual decides they are. We as a culture have decided that it's okay to be discontent with oneself and have collectively decided that the best solution can be in the form of a pill. This way of thinking has been reinforced to the extent that people don't even think twice before asking their doctor about the newest drug by AstraZeneca, Merck, or GlaxoSmithKilne.

For me, stopping the pills was the first real step on the road to recovery. The cure has been realizing that medicines aren't necessarily the best treatment for every problem, and taking control of the situation myself instead of passing the buck onto pharmaceutical companies has made all the difference.

Self Assessment
From this class, I have learned to think of writing in a new light. I never really considered writing to be an important process when it came to forming opinions. I had the preconceived notion that people who wrote books on in-depth topics such as social issues had fully formed arguments and that writing was merely the method used to convey these arguments to other people. I realize now that writing is not necessarily the ending point in argumentation, but rather it can be an integral part in the opinion-forming process. Now the question that comes to my mind is how will I use this newly discovered tool in my own life to form my own opinions on complex matters?

I feel that in the course of this class, I dropped the ball a bit when it came to the group essay. It is my last quarter here at the Art Institute, with portfolio day looming a week away. I have had complete tunnel vision when it comes to my classes, focusing almost all my time and energy on making my portfolio the best that it can be. While this is not necessarily a bad thing, it has been at the expense of all of my classes that are not portfolio. I realize that I didn't just come to school to learn about audio production. I came to get an education. By focusing so much effort on my portfolio, my other classes fell by the wayside. As is true with most things in life, what you get out of something is proportional to what you put in. That being said, if I had put more thought and effort into this class, I'm sure I would have gained more from it than I did.

Though this class came towards what for now appears to be the end of my educational journey at the Art Institute of Seattle, I feel I am leaving this class more prepared for in-depth thinking than I was when I started it. Realizing that there is always more behind an issue than what we usually see or think about has changed the way I think about societal issues. Though it often feels as though I as an individual can have little impact, thinking about the big picture has changed the way I mentally approach these problems.

I feel that I contributed to the experience of the other students in the class in a positive way. This is, of course, assuming that other students consider me voicing my opinions to be a positive thing. During group discussions, I typically chipped in my two cents on the topic, and I tried to be as helpful as possible during the peer critiques of the group essays. If nothing else during these critiques, I circled a decent amount of grammatical and punctuational errors. Someone had to do it.

If there is one thing I will retain from this class, it is an idea that kept reappearing over the course of the quarter: while we as a society value self-confidence and assuredness, one has to keep in mind the dangers of becoming overly complacent with one's own thoughts and opinions. Being too steadfast in one way of thinking completely shuts out the opportunity for new ideas to take hold. Some amount of uncertainty is necessary for personal growth, though it does no good without a desire to learn.

I mean, I think so anyway. I don't know. I'll figure it out.