Normality of the Psych

Normality is a central issue in psychiatry. It is defined in psychiatry as easy as the absence of signs and symptoms. That is very practical. Yet in psychology normality is not that easily defined. Some psychoanalysts seem to define normality as being ideal or living in Utopia. Freud had put a good definition by saying normality is the ability to love and to work. Normality can be seen from the perspective of how the majority of a given society feel and behave regarding the minority as abnormal.

first city in the world

The first city in the world is ERIDU, the sumerian city in the south of Iraq.

Read With The Candles

In Iraq we live without contiuous electricity power supply since 1991. That means that all the Iraqi students must have sometimes studied at night on the light of candles. Iraqis had been known since long time as good readers. It was sayed that Cairo reads, Beirut publishs, and Baghdad reads. Since years and Iraqies read at night with the candles' light.









That was my picture reading a newspaper at night with the light of a candle. These day the national electricity supply is only about 8 hours a day. The rest of the time we take elecricity froma local electricity generator for which we pay about 4 US Dollars for the one Ampear.














This is the picture of our local elecricity generator. It makes a lot of noise and waste products but we love it and can not live without it especially in the hot summer nights.

Evidence Based Medecine EBM

There are many who thinks that in psychiatry, scientists say whatever comes to there mind. I have heard many people who mistrust this branch of medicine. These people sometimes are unfortunately working in specialities got many things in common with psychiatry like psychology, sociology, philosophy, pharmacology, and most unfortunately some medical doctors!

There is what is called as EVIDENCE BASED MEDECINE since 1980s or maybe before. To make it simple to understant what that means let us explain it this way : the facts in medecine these days always contain NUMBERS ! e.g. we do not say these days that schizophrenia run in famillies, but we say like this " in a classic twin study of schizophrenia, Gottesman & Shields (1972) found in their sample 11 concordant and 11 disconcordant pairs of monozygotic twins and 3 concordant and 30 disconcordant in dizygotic pairs of twins".

This makes information in all branches of medicine more near to the truth if not absolutely true. And these days all the information that came from the past is retested and many theories had been rejected because they could not be proved in experiments.

And I heard alot about people saying nonsense about psychotropic drugs. I have heard a well know psychologist in a famous arabic T.V. channel says that antidepressants lead to irreversible intoxication and dependency. Do not believe that a drug is still being sold in the market and there is a prove that it causes too much harm than its benefits. And many of us had heard stories about how drugs were withdrawn from the market as soon as a dangerous side effects were reported.

But remember that all drug if not used right are dangerous.

Few Words of the Mute

Listen to this story of a mute teenager from Iraq with her mother:

In the psychiatric ward a beautiful teenager girl in her 15 lies silently in her bed. While me and Dr. Abbas were entering her room, she stayed still without motion, only her big beautiful eyes followed our entering. Her mother seems depressed and also did not move when we entered the room. The girl did not answer our greeting. We asked the mother about the problem. She told us that her daughter, who is mentally retarded had become mute again before few days. The girl who had a deformity in her feet was diagnosed as having a mental retardation since she was 8 years old. And because of there is no special school near the place she lives in, she stayed at home with her mother. She was the only child of this woman. The mother told us also about the birth of this girl. When the mother was in the last days of her pregnancy, she new that her husband whom she had lived with only for 2 months had died in the gulf war in 1991, and while she was shocked by that news she felt strong abdomenal pains. After few minutes she was having a difficult labour that ended with this handicaped beautiful girl. The mother had not been married again. We asked the mother about the last words said by her daughter. She told us that when they were coming to the hospital, a mini-bus had exploded just few meters beyond them and no shell had hit them. At that moment the girl said just few words:" mommy, if we were just few minutes late we would have been lucky to be dead both of us and get rid of our lives"