Candle light

Tonight I decided to study by candle light. So I lit every candle I own, and read. I took a few pictures to capture the scene, and here they are. Click on the pictures for a better view.

Today in Psychiatry, we interviewed our first psychotic patient. She was a middle-aged woman who claimed that she had walked to Memphis while picking up trash to make the world a better place. When we asked her where she slept at night, she said she went back home to Nashville. Every night. She said she was picking up government papers and putting them in a trash bin. She didn't say why.

After that, the psychiatrist told us about catatonia - a state where the patient is like a statue for prolonged periods. He told us that he saw a woman who would lie on her back with all four limbs in the air, perfectly still for hours. You could go up to her and position her limbs any way you wanted, and they would remain in that exact position for hours. And every once in a while, she would snap out of her state, and in a burst of activity, run down the hall for about 5 seconds, only to freeze into another statue-like form. This continued for two days. The cool thing is that the doctor gave her some drug, and after one minute, she sat on her bed and told him what the past two days were like for her.

The most amazing thing of the day is that a good third of my class still does not believe that schizophrenia is a brain disorder.