Hello! My name is Lily, a 16 year old who is taking her first year in the IBDP programme.
From nine years old, psychology has been on my radar as one of the most interesting subjects to come out of academia. How does the brain work? How does one grow up and acquire the phenomenon of personality, and how do life experiences and culture change an individual?
Specifically, I fell in love with researching different mental disorders — how they develop, how they express themselves in different people, what trauma and different stressors do to the brain. And right at the dawn of the mental health movement, I realized very suddenly that we really didn’t know anything at all about mental illness.
Not only do most individuals, even psychologists demonize many mental disorders, namely personality disorders and disorders that stem from trauma such as dissociati
ve identity disorder (DID), but these disorders become completely out of the question when we factor in things like cultural barriers.
As a mixed Asian and American individual who has lived in Indonesia their whole life, I witnessed these disparities firsthand, but a common factor remains. We have only started the journey in understanding psychology as a collective, and a widespread psychological literacy will not come without significant societal, cultural and even political reform.
My current ultimate goal: to specialize in pathology and clinical psychology when I am older, offering treatment to individuals facing mental health challenges which are often overlooked. I want to be the person who brings psychology to places where it hasn’t yet bloomed into its full potential, and I want to lead this aforementioned reform with one area of education at a time.
This blog will be chock full of my personal psychological escapades, and hopefully we will learn a thing or two together the more that I write and educate myself. Stick around, maybe you’ll enjoy it here!