• Question: What is the hardest problem that someone had that you helped

    Asked by anon-316011 on 1 Apr 2022.
    • Photo: Jamie Chan

      Jamie Chan answered on 14 Mar 2022:

      Hey there. I mostly study people’s behaviour in my work by conducting research. So, I don’t usually deliver treatments!

    • Photo: Hannah Howman

      Hannah Howman answered on 14 Mar 2022:

      Similar to Jamie, I work in a different area of psychology so I’m more focused on why people behave the way they do rather than providing treatments. Though I have been a Shout Volunteer where I helped support people online, and they could be experiencing a variety of problems. I don’t think there was one problem that I found harder than any others during my time as a volunteer though.

    • Photo: Reece Bush-Evans

      Reece Bush-Evans answered on 14 Mar 2022:

      Similar to Jamie and Hannah, I work in a different area of psychology. However, my current research looks at helping individuals who have a gambling addiction. It can be rather difficult to get people to follow certain interventions or to try to help them when certain events (e.g., big sport events) are taking place. Everyday is a learning curve.

    • Photo: Nadine Mirza

      Nadine Mirza answered on 17 Mar 2022:

      The hardest patient I had to work with was a young man who looked like he was paralysed but his body was perfectly healthy and fine.

      He had something called Catatonia, where his body was frozen and he was unable to move or speak but it wasn’t because of any injury or damage to his body. He was having terrible mental health problems that made him freeze. We didn’t know how to speak to him because he couldn’t speak back and it made it very difficult to help him.

      I ended up communicating with him through his eyes, which he could still blink. I asked him to blink once for no and twice for yes and I would only ask him Yes or No questions. That’s how we communicated for several weeks but I was able to learn more about him by doing this and slowly he was able to started shaking his head or giving gestures with his hand. This helped us discuss the struggles he was going through and help him even more.

    • Photo: Michelle Newman

      Michelle Newman answered on 18 Mar 2022:

      The people involved in my research, and the people my supervisors work with in hospital, have brain injuries. The majority of these tend to be mild injuries, what you might have heard called concussion. This is quite difficult to work with because at the moment we do not know enough about concussion, and it seems that the tools we use for more severe head injuries are not sensitive enough to indicate what is not working properly after a concussion. To complicate it, often you do not see any structural damage to the brain on brain scans in concussion, as it is often very small and spread out, rather than a large area of damage in once place. The work I am doing to trying to develop new tools to be able to assess concussion better.

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