Psych!

Remember when this was all the trend. You'd reach out your hand and offer to shake and just as a person was about to shake, you'd put it back and yell, "Psych!", because, well, it was some kind of psych-out.

Yeah, that was real popular.

And that's my weak lead-in to psychology vs. psychiatry and hanging out with the crowd.

Yesterday, I was told that the girlfriend of an ex-CS grad student was going to defend her Ph.D. thesis in psychology. Shortly thereafter, some people went to grad pub, which is kind of a happy hour for grad students on a Friday evening at a nearby bar. We were to meet at an Indian restaurant called Tiffin. It's good, if a little pricey.

I showed up about 15 minutes after 7, which was 15 minutes after I should have been there. The place was mostly empty. There was a party way, way in the back, and a few more around them. I didn't recognize anyone I knew back there. I thought maybe they decided to go elsewhere. There was a group of two or so up front, but I didn't recognize them either.

I finally called up Jaime who said he was running late, and that he had just called Jeremy who said they were heading there as well. So basically everyone was arriving late.

By the time everyone showed up, there was maybe 11 of us. There was Jaime and his girlfriend, Amy. There was Jeremy and his girlfriend, Penny, the one who just became Dr. Penny. There was Rob and his girlfriend. There were maybe four other psychology majors, two guys and at least one girl, possibly two.

We segregated into two groups, with psychology majors on the one side (and girlfriends) and computer science types on the other. There was one psychology guy, Tom, who decided to sit among the computer science types. He said he already hung out with the other psychology students all the time, so he wanted a change.

Tom's a very funny guy, though I couldn't tell you much of what he said, partly because of the din, and partly because I simply can't remember.

Humor's an interesting thing. It requires a quick mind to think of appropriate things to say. It also requires a savvy for knowing cultural facts. You can make fun of modern music, music from the 80s, from politics, to video games, to who-knows-what. To do it effectively means you must have observed something people recognize, and yet twist it enough to make it funny. For example, a white guy making fun of a psychotic Russian girl. That's funny.

Tom's also gay. Or as Jeremy likes to say, "he's very homosexual". Now, I suppose his buddy, Jimmy is, as well. And one of the girls seemed to suggest she was a lesbian. This makes the graduate psychology department one big rainbow coalition, and not of the Jesse Jackson variety.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

In fact, that's part of the interesting point. Would anyone honestly be able to be part of the graduate psychology program, yet be closeted? There's something that seems inherently wrong with that. If it were theater, there's perhaps a badge of honor. If it's the sciences, people tend to uphold their image of nerds unable to get dates anyway, and there's less of a need to wave a flag, rainbow or otherwise.

Being gay and closeted in psychology seems like being a political sciece major and hiding your party leanings. It just doesn't seem to gel.

One thing I've noticed about psychology majors is that they are much more outgoing and extroverted than, say, computer science majors. Again, that may have a lot to do with their study. If you're trying to get people to open up and deal with their emotions, it might be useful for you to deal with them as well.

As Tom said later that evening, many people enter psychology after having been treated themselves. Similarly, many computer scientists enter computer science after playing video games. OK, a bit of a joke, though true in both cases.

This is particularly interesting because psychology scares some people. Parents want their kids to be doctors who heal people, but not necessarily psychologists. Psychology, after all, doesn't have definitive answers. Neither does medicine for that matter but they can look for very specific symptoms that can, in principle, be measured (sure, there are a few maladies for which modern medicine has little idea how to treat).

Psychology does fascinate me mostly because they study people, and how people react, and mostly how to help people help themselves through talk. I was curious how culture plays a role. Both Penny and Tom felt it was more challenging for African Americans to be open with their feelings. There are trust issues, especially when talking to whites, and I think, especially when dealing with emotional insecurities. African Americans want to be seen as in charge of who they are, which is a kind of insecurity, whereas whites and Asians seem more attuned to their own weaknesses.

However, I was thinking that it might be even tougher to treat someone in a foreign country with different worldviews. For example, many years ago in the US, housewives who had very little to do in the workworld might find themselves bored, and spend their time gossiping about one person or another. After a while, this might lead to a kind of backbiting as one person tries to smear the reputation of another.

I don't doubt that this kind of thing happens today, but with women able to have careers of their own, there's less need for gossip. However, it may be that Asians still peddle in gossip, and that worldview may be more prevalent. You see a little of this in the show Sopranos. I saw one episode about how Italian men were supposed to avoid saying they performed oral sex for their wives and girlfriends. It was perceived as something less than masculine. Men would keep it secret if they were doing it, according to this show. And of course, the main premise is how the patriarch of the crime family seeks help from a psychologist.

So I had to ask the difference between a psychologist and a psychiatrist. Turns out they're rather similar. Psychiatrists are medical doctors, so they get a medical degree and go to med school. They typically prescribe drugs to deal with problems. Psychologists, on the other hand, typically deal with people by talking to them. I tend to think that that's the better option, but then I've never sought out either for help.

During this discussion, it came up that both Penny and Tom (and all of the psychology department) had regular patients. For a computer scientist, that's rather novel. In order for a psychologist to complete training, they must talk to real people and effectively do the things they will do for real, much like a medical doctor does.

A computer scientist in grad school, on the other hand, isn't training to be a programmer. They aren't trying to become better coders. They are trying to solve problems, with computers as their tools. Now, sometimes the problems are quite academic, thus the solutions they find aren't applicable much to the real world. For example, computational complexity studies how hard problems are to solve, and some are so hard as to be not practically solvable. They try to construct hierarchies of difficulties and show why these form separate classes.

All that information progresses the field in a way, but it's not real world training to do anything besides research.

Although psychology is a kind of science (is it? it feels like a kind of medical study), it reminds me a bit of theater. In theater, people study to be other people. They learn to deal with how to portray or magnify their emotions, to understand human nature so they can portray it on stage. Psychology seems to deal with similar emotions, but mostly to help people who have a difficult time dealing with it themselves.

Some people have sought medical treatment wanting to avoid the highs and lows of emotions feeling a middle ground all the time would make them feel better. Penny said "that's just part of being human", that is, the highs and the lows. While I agree, I tend to believe I'm someone that's not neither up nor down a whole lot, and so that being even keel isn't that unusual either. Maybe it would be better to be up and down. I don't know.

In fact, that's what made it somewhat difficult to relate to these folks, although simply by virtue of what they study, Penny and Tom tend to get along with people and know how to get people to relax.

There's one thing that's almost ironic about very out gay guys. They seem to get along really well with women. Now, this has often been attributed to gay men thinking they're women (which isn't often the case, I think, but many don't feel they're jocks either) or that women think gay men are safe. However, even straight men sometimes like flamboyant gay men. Witness the perception of the hetero sports media of Johnny Weir, who, while not exactly claiming he's gay, comes across as very gay.

And by that I mean there's a kind of campiness affectation that some gay men have. Who knows why this happens. It's not universal by any means. Joel Spolsky is gay, but he's not camping it up in his dialogue. Timothy Treadwell, the guy in Grizzly Man, sounded plenty gay, but he was actually straight. So, when people are said to be gay, there's a certain way of dressing and speaking that is associated with that.

And it only happens, alas, with gay men. Lesbians get far, far, far less airplay. Think of a good lesbian film or one that resonates with the lesbian community. Can you think of any? I saw Saving Face, but really, the lesbian community wasn't even mentioned. The main stereotype for lesbians are women that cut their hair short and spiky and sound like Italian Americans.

Tom, for instance, doesn't quite have a campy voice, though it's got some affectation. He does have his hair dyed a bit blond, wears clothing of a certain type that might suggest gayness, and has a penchant to impersonate folks and is a bit flamboyant. There's a need, I suppose, to advertise so as to not cause people to be deceived.

As someone once said, for the most part, African Americans don't have to advertise they are African Americans (same with Asian Americans) whereas Latinos can blend in and may have to indicate they are Latinos. Since homosexuality isn't exactly heriditary in the way "race" is, gays don't exactly stand out, unless they find someway to purposely stand out.

The interesting thing is how gay men often get along better with women than straight men, perhaps because some gay men like the same kinds of things that some straight women do, and because gay men are more open with their emotions than straight men. And even that's a stereotype of sorts.

This works against all sorts of expected stereotypes you might imagine people would have about gay men (i.e., they would hate women and only want to hang out with other men).

Anyway, I found it a fascinating evening because of that, and was glad that my desire to eat Indian food outweighed my sense that I wasn't all that close with Jeremy nor Penny (even though both are pleasant enough individuals).

It's made me wonder how well I would have fared in an area that's quite different from computer science, and whether I would have had any aptitude for that area.