Exploring Psychiatric Disorders in Adolescence – Alex

My project consisted of taking online courses in psychology and psychiatry with a focus on adolescence. So every day I did a lesson in one of four classes, but I didn’t really feel like I was learning anything useful. I would take notes on huge articles assigned to me, looking up most of the medical jargon, and feeling like I wasn’t making any true progress. So half-way through my project, while thinking about what my presentation should be, I realized that I had been looking at my project the wrong way. My original essential question, how do psychology intertwine in terms of the adolescent experience, was too broad; something that I touched upon in early pieces of reflective writing. This question was someone’s life’s work, not a six week project. So in a coffee-induced frenzy, I came up with a new question: Why do so many psychiatric disorders emerge or manifest in adolescence? While this can also be considered to be someone’s life’s work since no one really has an answer to this question, it is much more manageable. So I set out to find articles that could help me, and luckily, I found quite a few.