Tag personal

What is a scientist?

Sinead Harold Leave a comment

This post was inspired by my earlier rambling on whether I’m enough of a scientist for sci-comm. After publishing that post, I decided to step back and look again at what factors decide who a scientist is, and why the question matters to me.

I’ll begin with a logical starting point, the dictionary. The word “science” comes from the Latin word “scientia” meaning “knowledge”. So if science is fundamentally knowledge, is a knowledgeable person a scientist? That’s an easy statement to reject, as people can be knowledgeable about many other topics without knowing much science. Also, although the word science dates back to roughly the 12th century, the word scientist was only coined in 1833; for roughly 600 years, science knowledge existed without people being called scientists.

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Dissociation and Gigs

Sinead Harold Leave a comment

Gigs are a confusing place to be when you experience any form of dissociation. For me, there are two likely outcomes. Sometimes I feel the barriers between me and everything else reduce, so I feel closer to seeing the world as a typical person does. But sometimes I instead feel more aware of the dissonance between what I’m perceiving and what I’m experiencing, and so I notice those barriers more acutely.

This isn’t an aspect of dissociation that I’ve talked to anyone about before, but it’s been on my mind recently while I’ve tried to figure out which elements make the good outcome more likely.

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My Diagnosis Experience, Part 2

Sinead Harold Leave a comment

Some notes for this series; I’m not going to be using any identifying information, so I’ll be referring to each  person involved by a letter+ number to tell them apart, as it does get rather confusing. The colour-coding is also just to keep track.
K1– university counsellor
K2– university wellbeing practitioner
L-   one of my friends, who I needed to bring with me to some meetings. 
C1– first mental health assessor at the community services.
C2– second  assessor at the community services.
C3– final assessor at the community services.

Doctor’s Surgery

One of the services involved in my treatment was my GP’s surgery.I don’t have much to write about this part,  as I chose to avoid them as much as possible. While  they technically knew everything that was going on, because each other service wrote letters to the GP updating them with new developments, this didn’t have any practical use.

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