It just isn’t normal to be completely normal

Hands up if you have ever taken an online personality or psychiatric test.
If you have, then you can tick the box marked neurotic straight away!

You get lots of these tests on line. Almost all of them will tell you that you have some kind of disorder, syndrome or tendency or other. Before you go off and take these and add paranoia and hypochondria to your list of symptoms bear in mind most of these ‘disorders’ are based on scales or spectra, most people will appear on them somewhere: it just isn’t normal to be completely normal. It is only if you move the needle all the way to eleven (to paraphrase a Spinal Tap reference) that you may possibly have cause for concern.

If you are ever unlucky enough to have to visit a psychiatrist (or lucky enough, depending on how you look at it, for me it was the road to getting better), then they too are likely to start asking you personality questionnaire type questions. However, I have never found a questionnaire online that is similar to the sort of things that I used to be asked by the psychiatrist.

Some of the questions cover the type of thing that you would expect, for example:

Do you often feel depressed? How often? For how long?
Do you feel unable to get out of bed?

and so on.

Some of the questions were a lot more unexpected. For example:

Do you ever fail to recognise your own reflection?
Do you ever suspect that other people might not be real? 
Do you mistake shadows or inanimate objects for people?

I laughed out loud at that last question which caused the psychiatrist to start scribbling away in his notes. This made me wish I hadn’t laughed. Then again, for all I know, he had probably just remembered something that needed to be added to his shopping list for tea. I believe even psychiatrists shop and eat, occasionally.

Some questionnaires are of the:

How often: all the time, often, sometimes, rarely, never
and; 
For how long do these symptoms last: less than a day, less  than a week,   more that a week, more than a month, for several months sort.
 
Others are just straight yes or no.

Some cover only how you feel right now and in recent days and others are based on: Do you now, or have you ever done or felt like this?

I have also sat tests that were more like IQ, brain function and memory tests: the sort of thing you might come across on for example Nintendo Mind Gym or an IQ test. Probably the most well known of these tests is the Stroop Test, where you are shown the names of colours written in different coloured text e.g. the words red, blue, green and yellow, written in red, green, blue and yellow ink where the word red may be coloured blue. You have to go through the test once saying the word that is written down and then a second time trying to say the colour in which the word is written.

You can try this here:
http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/java/timestc.html

The classic psychiatric test that is often shown in films is the Rorschach Ink Blot test. I regret to say that I have never been asked to do one of these. They look like fun.

Week commencing 28/05/07

Medication: None
Exercise: 2 hours
Alcohol: None
Anxiety: Fine
Anxiety Level (0-10): 0
Number of Panic Attacks:0
Severity of Panic Attack (0-5): NA
Depression: No real depression to speak of although I have been a bit grumpy and stressed due to lack of sleep and work.
Depression Level (0-5): 1
Mania: Fine
Mania Level (0-5): 0

Summary

All in all I’m feeling pretty fine after my wee sabbatical. I’m not sleeping very well, which means I’m tired and a bit prone to finding that little things are getting on my nerves and work is slightly more rubbish than usual but, other than that, fine.