Psychology Research

I'm in an experimental psychology class this semester and I'm going to have to do a research study. I get to pick my own topic and I for once my mind is blank.

We had to turn in some bull crap busy work homework the other day ...basically just printing out 5 articles from the University's online journal stacks, letting our TA know that we do in fact know how to find articles. Off the top of my head, I decided I was going to find out if there had been any articles written about a possible correlation between ADHD and OCD. Why? Well I have ADHD and I think I have some tendencies toward OCD. So looking for a possible connection seemed legit. I found a few articles and printed them out and took them to class.

As I sit in class with my articles on the desk in front of me, the girl sitting to my right looks at them and then looks at me, and says "so which one are you?" I looked at her for a few seconds, blinked, and asked, "am I that obvious?" She said something to the effect of ..."well isn't that why we all got into psychology? ... because there is something "wrong" with us and we want to study it to be better able to understand it all?" I thought about this and decided she was right, at least in my case. I told her I was ADHD but had always wondered if I had some degree of OCD as well.

She showed me her articles. One was about anxiety, the other about panic attacks. She said she had been diagnosed with each and we both chuckled. We then had a long discussion about what we wanted to do with our psychology degrees.

I had never thought about it before yesterday but the girl in my class was definitely right. When it comes down to it, I think one of the driving forces behind my deciding to major in psychology was trying to figure out what was really going on in my head. That, and the fact that I had a totally kick-ass psychology teacher for my first two years in college (who is also ADHD). She fostered in me, a love for psychology because she made it fun, she was a lot of fun and she was so extremely open about her own diagnosis of ADHD and struggles with it. The first time I heard Dr. Jones speak was a defining moment for me. In a few seconds, she was somehow able to make me feel a lot less self conscious about having ADHD, and able to talk about it openly with other people without being embarrassed at all. This would later lead the way for me to have similar discussions about other "taboo" topics.