Week 7

I spent the majority of this week putting up posters with a scannable code up around my sight. As it is in Industry City, there is a lot of foot traffic meaning that more people will see it. So far, the general consensus has been that people suffering from an intense phobia tend not to associate a certain event with it. Moreso, they claim to have experienced their fear since their childhood. This could lend itself to the idea that, rather than a phobia being a response to a traumatic event, it could have more genetic factors. This claim is based on a small sample of research so much more data is needed before I can make a correlative assumption.

At the beginning of the week, I learned about two new phenomena that are occurring within my generation. The first is known as “failure to launch”. This is where adults continue to rely on their parents far after they are old enough to move out and become independent. Multiple therapists that I work with attended a seminar to deal with this as there has been a great influx of patients asking for help with this issue. From what I gathered, there seems to be a combination of economic and psychological causes for this behavior. The other phenomenon is known as ARFID which is an acronym for Avoidance/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder. This is an eating disorder in which a child refuses to eat to the point of malnutrition. Neither of these issues really relates to my topic, but I find it interesting to learn about the psychological trends of today.