Alright, let’s talk about digging into the topics around abnormal psychology. It wasn’t like I just sat down with a textbook one day.
My journey started way back, working this awful call center job. Seriously, soul-crushing stuff. You’d get people calling in, and sometimes, you could just hear that something wasn’t right. Not just angry customers, but people who seemed really, really lost or scared, talking in circles, or just sounding completely flat, you know?
Dealing with the Unexpected
There was this one guy, he’d call maybe once a week. Never really had a problem with his account, he just seemed to need to talk. But his stories got weirder and weirder. He’d talk about people following him, about messages in the TV static. At first, you brush it off, like, “Okay, weirdo.” But after a while, it got me thinking.
Then there was a lady who would call, sobbing uncontrollably, couldn’t even get out what the issue was. Total panic over something small, like a five-dollar fee. It happened multiple times. My supervisor just told me to transfer her or get her off the line quick. Standard procedure. But it felt… wrong. You start wondering, what’s really going on with these folks?
Sorting Through Patterns
It wasn’t just those extreme cases. You saw patterns.
- People with overwhelming anxiety about tiny things.
- Folks who sounded deeply, deeply sad, no matter what you said.
- Others who were maybe too happy, almost manic, talking a mile a minute.
- And yeah, the ones who seemed totally disconnected from what was happening.
I didn’t have names for any of this stuff back then. To me, it was just “the really anxious callers,” “the super depressed ones,” or “the guy who thinks the FBI is tapping his toaster.”
Trying to Understand
After I finally quit that job (best day ever, by the way), those experiences stuck with me. It wasn’t about being nosy. It was more like, “Why do people get stuck like that?” That’s when I started actually looking things up, just basic stuff online at first, then grabbing some intro books from the library.
I started connecting the dots between what I saw and the topics people study in abnormal psychology. Things like:
- Anxiety disorders: That lady terrified of the fee? Yeah, that clicked. Panic attacks, generalized anxiety… it wasn’t just “being worried.”
- Mood disorders: The super sad callers, the overly energetic ones. Depression and bipolar disorder started making a bit more sense, not just as words, but as real struggles I’d heard firsthand.
- Psychotic disorders: The guy hearing messages? Schizophrenia, delusional disorders… hearing about these gave a name to experiences that seemed completely alien before.
- Personality disorders: This one was trickier, but sometimes you’d deal with people whose entire way of interacting felt consistently… difficult, or strange, in a way that went beyond just a bad mood.
So, my “practice” wasn’t some formal study. It was years of talking to people on the phone in a stressful environment, seeing bits and pieces of these struggles, and then trying to find frameworks to understand what I’d witnessed. It made the topics less academic and more about, well, real people having a really hard time.
