Circumstantial speech - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Circumstantial speech - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Circumstantial speech (also referred to as circumstantiality)
is the result of a non-linear thought pattern and occurs when the focus
of a conversation drifts, but often comes back to the point.^[1] In circumstantiality, unnecessary details and irrelevant remarks cause a delay in getting to the point.^[2]
If someone exhibits circumstantial speech during a conversation, they
will often "talk the long way around" to their point, which can be seen
in contrast to linear speech, which is direct, succinct, and to the
point.

Circumstantial speech is more direct than tangential speech in which the speaker wanders and drifts and usually never returns to the original topic, and is far less severe than logorrhea.^[3]
A helpful metaphor is traveling to a destination. If someone is
thinking and speaking linearly, then they will go directly to the point.
Circumstantial speech is more like taking unnecessary detours, but the
speaker eventually arrives at the intended destination. In tangential
speech, the speaker simply gets lost along the way, never returning to
the original topic of conversation. With logorrhea, which is closer to word salad, it may not even be clear that the speaker had a particular idea or point in the first place.

Contents

• 1 Symptoms
• 2 Example
• 3 Treatment
• 4 See also
• 5 References

Abilene paradox - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Abilene paradox - Wikipedia



In an Abilene paradox a group of people collectively decide on
a course of action that is counter to the preferences of many (or all)
of the individuals in the group.^[1][2]
It involves a common breakdown of group communication in which each
member mistakenly believes that their own preferences are counter to the
group's and, therefore, does not raise objections. A common phrase
relating to the Abilene Paradox is a desire not to "rock the boat." This
differs from groupthink in that the Abilene paradox is characterized by an inability to manage agreement.^[3]

Contents

• 1 Explanation
• 2 Research
• 3 Applications of the theory
• 4 See also
• 5 References
• 6 Further reading
• 7 External links

Explanation

The term was introduced by management expert Jerry B. Harvey in his 1974 article The Abilene Paradox: The Management of Agreement.^[3] The name of the phenomenon comes from an anecdote in the article which Harvey uses to elucidate the paradox:

On a hot afternoon visiting in Coleman, Texas, the family is comfortably playing dominoes on a porch, until the father-in-law suggests that they take a trip to Abilene
[53 miles north] for dinner. The wife says, "Sounds like a great idea."
The husband, despite having reservations because the drive is long and
hot, thinks that his preferences must be out-of-step with the group and
says, "Sounds good to me. I just hope your mother wants to go." The
mother-in-law then says, "Of course I want to go. I haven't been to
Abilene in a long time."

The drive is hot, dusty, and long. When they arrive at the
cafeteria, the food is as bad as the drive. They arrive back home four
hours later, exhausted.

One of them dishonestly says, "It was a great trip, wasn't it?" The
mother-in-law says that, actually, she would rather have stayed home,
but went along since the other three were so enthusiastic. The husband
says, "I wasn't delighted to be doing what we were doing. I only went to
satisfy the rest of you." The wife says, "I just went along to keep you
happy. I would have had to be crazy to want to go out in the heat like
that." The father-in-law then says that he only suggested it because he
thought the others might be bored.

The group sits back, perplexed that they together decided to take a
trip which none of them wanted. They each would have preferred to sit
comfortably, but did not admit to it when they still had time to enjoy
the afternoon.

I exist in a fog. Some days it blows away, but some days it's heavy and suffocating | Anna Spargo-Ryan | Comment is free | The Guardian

Tuesday 3 March 2015 08.41 AEDT

‘At the height of my illness – because that is what it is – I had
anxiety attacks from the moment I woke up until I could finally sleep.’

Comments 106

Last week, while I waited for a meeting to begin, two people pondered mental illness. Is it real? It’s probably a buzzword, they said. But I mean, I guess you have to feel sorry for them. Still. You know. You know.

I sat at the other end of the table and listened to my heart drumming in my chest. Fast as you like, bam-bam-bam-bam, then skipping a few times, heart palpitations, bam-bam . . . bam-bam. They congratulated themselves on their empathy and I excused myself to sit in a corridor and breathe as far into my body as I could, to find myself again.


About a quarter of Australians will experience an anxiety condition in their lives. It is the realest thing I can imagine.


As a child I would lie in bed and look up at the glow-in-the-dark stars my dad had carefully mounted, and I would think: the stars are so far away; the stars are infinite; the stars will be here long after I’m gone. I will be gone. One day, I will be gone.


It was a sharp intake of breath and a surge of adrenalin and then flight, out of bed in a flurry of blankets, through the lounge room, along the hallway, faster and faster with my lungs clanging in my ears and the knowledge that one day I will be gone chasing me, chasing me along the hallway until I rounded the corner and threw myself under my parents’ bed and stayed there.


I was six years old.


It didn’t seem abnormal, and if my parents thought it was, they never mentioned. Anyone would react that way, given to think about the certainty of their death (something I have always been inclined to do). I wasn’t afraid of many other things. Well, elevators. And sure, heights. And the ocean. And the boy who lived next door. And getting trapped in a fridge. And Astro Boy. And lemons. But apart from that, fearless.


In grade four I ran away from school because I thought for too long about how eyes work.


In grade six I spent half an hour crying in the toilets because I thought my hand was on backwards.

And so it went. Now, at 32, I experience frequent and intense periods of anxiety.


I have been afraid since before I knew what it was to be afraid, before I knew there was any danger. I feel the fear not in my head but in my very self, cracking and thrashing against the part of me that knows how to be a person at all. I feel it before I know I am feeling it, hissing there in the soles of my feet, shouting at me from the pain in my knees, from the weakness in my hands, from the tingling in my jaw. It lurches from my throat like a wave of black tar and I choke on it and the world caves in around me and I am drowning.


And it is always so final, the panic. Every time I feel it, it could be the last feeling I have. The most acute and insurmountable feelings anyone has ever felt. A face-to-face meeting with mortality, every time. I can’t breathe. My throat has closed. I’m going blind.


I will die, I will die.


So far, I haven’t died once. And I can try to rationalise the panic by remembering that: “I’ve felt exactly like this before and I didn’t die.” Except that maybe this is the time. Maybe all of the panicking I’ve done in the past has given me a stomach ulcer and now I’m bleeding internally and this time I’m going to die for real.


I have generalised anxiety disorder. 


The anxiety disorder exists separately from my personality. Anna the Person is tough and smart and honest. None of these things about me are rendered untrue because of my anxiety, it’s just that sometimes, someone throws a heavy blanket over them. I am tough, but I can’t get to the shops today. I am smart, but I think that if I go outside I will float away into the atmosphere. I am honest, but my brain is lying to me.


Chronic anxiety is miserable. There’s the waiting: will I panic? when? will it be as bad as last time? will I be safe? can I get out? It is often co-morbid with depression: I can’t do this forever, I just want it to stop, I want to be normal, I want to stop worrying, maybe I should just drive into the ocean. It seems relentless. Years of relentless, agonising fear.


We’re chronic anxiety people. Our anxiety has been treated and it hasn’t gone away. Sometimes it bores the people around us. It definitely bores us. God, it’s boring. So we push forward in spite of our very boring fear. We climb out of bed every (OK, most) days and we exist in the world inside a fog, and some days the fog is light and it blows away for a while, and some days the fog is thick and it rolls in around us and we suffocate. 


People don’t make ad campaigns for us. Our anxiety is not so easily classified. Our symptoms aren’t always identifiable. When I’m at my most anxious, I look right into the face of the man I love and I can’t remember who he is. How do you put that in a mood-lit commercial? I am insane, I am crazy, I am the only one who feels this way.


I’m not. I’m just a person with an anxiety disorder. There are millions of us, out there in the world. We carry our anxiety with us like a colostomy bag, filling it with fear, emptying it into the quiet corners where we sit and we breathe. Sometimes, we find pockets of peace.


I will die, I will die.


But not from this.
 

The truth about "pathological liars" (& sub-self control)

Uploaded on 26 Oct 2011

A veteran psychotherapist describes what causes compulsive dishonesty in
adults and kids, and inites you to change "pathological" to
"compulsive." This adjectiver is less shaming and inflammatory, and more
accurate. The video includes links to helpful online articles at http://sfhelp.org (e.g. http://sfhelp.org/cx/apps/dishonesty.htm) and to related YouTube videos.

Being angry on Twitter causes heart disease: Big Data fact or fiction?

27 January 2015, 2.06am AEDT

Angry Tweeter.
 

A spate of articles have reported a study

that claims the ability to predict a communities’ risk of heart disease
from the language most commonly used by that community on twitter.

Analysing 148 million tweets, the researchers from the University of
Pennsylvania and the University of Melbourne mapped the tweeters to
counties in the US for which they also had data about the incidence of
heart disease and other health and demographic data. The researchers
found that they got a higher correlation between the language used in
tweets from people in those counties and heart disease than the
correlation between heart disease and other indicators such as income
and education, smoking, chronic disease and racial background.

The language that signalled the increased likelihood of heart disease
was broken down into 3 different categories of hostility/aggression,
hate/interpersonal tension and boredom/fatigue. Words that were
frequently used within those categories included words such as “fuck”,
“hate”, “drama”, “bitches” in the hostility/hate categories through to
“tired” and “shower” in the boredom category.

People tweeting in areas that had a lower risk of heart disease on
the other hand tended to use words such as “conference”, “student”,
“holiday” and “faith”.

The mainstream press, encouraged by the researchers involved in the
study, have picked up on this study as another example of how “big data”
and social media can reveal a whole range of information about a
population’s health and well-being. One report
featured the graphic from the study that showed the actual incidence of
heart disease in a part of the US with that predicted by Twitter.

Tweets and heart disease

The interesting thing about the graphic is that if you actually
compare the specific areas in each of the two diagrams, they are not
particularly the same at all.

The graphic is a great example of how data visualisation can be used to mislead
the viewer. The two diagrams seem similar because they use the same
colours and have identical areas which have to be the same because no
data is available.

Pick any two identical blocks however and the chances are that they
won’t be the same colour. This is because the predictive power of the
twitter analysis is actually quite low. Granted, the analysis may be slightly
better than using a combination of other indicators such as income,
education, chronic disease and race, but that difference is in actual
fact minuscule.

So what is the general language on Twitter actually saying? Well, it
is likely that the language used in tweets may reflect the
socio-economic level of a particular area. But even this claim is making
a number of unsubstantiated assumptions. It is easy to suppose that
lower socioeconomic populations would tweet more frequently about things
they hate using swear words than people who are more likely to be
educated from higher socioeconomic backgrounds. Interestingly however,
the study claims to have “controlled” for socio-economic status, which
means that the researchers believed that the language used was not
simply a representation of this status. Unfortunately, no details are
given of how they did this and so it is not possible to say whether this
was actually a reasonable assumption.

The study is interesting in that it suggests that a specific
communities’ makeup can be identified by the language that they use on
social media. This in turn may be an indicator of other factors such as
the specific community’s health and well-being and the consequences of
that health and well-being.

However, as attractive as those suggestions may be, the study showed
weak correlations and gave very little underlying support for any
particular theory of “causation”. So as much as they could speculate,
the researchers could really not say why they saw these statistical
results. The paper actually highlights some of the fundamental problems
with so-called big data where large numbers distort statistics to point at imagined relationships.

What this study definitely does not say is that being angry on
twitter will lead to, or is anyway related to, heart disease, which has
been the unfortunate suggestion in the selling of the study in news
reports.

Tania Lacy’s battles with mental illness are no laughing matter | Herald Sun

Tania Lacy’s battles with mental illness are no laughing matter | Herald Sun

 

WHEN Tania Lacy wakes up in the morning, she puts on her make up comfortable in the knowledge that she doesn’t have to hide any more

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, comedian Lacy — who now lives in
Balwyn North with her husband and son — was one of TV’s most
recognisable faces.

But lurking underneath the stardom was a
mental illness which would not only cost her a career, but could very
well have cost her life.

Lacy was suffering from undiagnosed borderline personality disorder.

She knew what was happening, but had no control over it which led to
relationship breakdowns, caused her career to plummet and saw her spiral
into a world of heroin abuse.

But through a mini-documentary, which airs on SBS 2’s The Feed tonight, Lacy, now a writer, hopes to clear the air about the demons that plagued her career.

“I see myself as a recovering celebrity,” she said.

“In a way, this is sort of my coming out, but also I hope others see this in someway as an apology for the way I was.

“Also, I want to highlight that we still have a long way to go in
understanding mental illness. If I had something like diabetes, people
wouldn’t bat an eyelid, but mental illness is immeasurable and people
are afraid of it.”

Lacy said she felt incredibly lucky to live in a
country like Australia that offered up treatment to people living with
mental illness.

“While I understand I have a mental illness, I am also very privileged,” she said.

“I have a roof over my head, food on the tables and I can access treatment whenever I need it.

“I always feel so sorry for people who live in third world countries that don’t have access to what I have.”

The mini-documentary is directed by Leader journalist Nicole Precel.

The Psychotic Family | Psychology Today

The Psychotic Family

Dysfunction, denial, and seven suggestions for dealing with trauma

Published on January 15, 2015 by Carrie Barron, M.D. in The Creativity Cure

 My client, Ken, thought of his family as dysfunctional, until a therapist friend who knew him well said, “You grew up in a psychotic family.”  The friend explained that the “reality testing” in the family of origin was “ off.” Ken’s disturbed, devil-may-care older brother was idealized as gifted while he, a hard worker, was seen as having deficits. The brother received many of the family’s financial and emotional resources while he was expected to manage on his own. With ample time to himself, he studied hard and developed a variety of skills to pass the time.  As an adult, he went far, while the brother, unfortunately, deteriorated.  Ken’s rise could be due to intrinsic ability, grit or both. Sometimes benign neglect is a good thing for kids. Determined to not repeat the past, they develop a highly honed awareness and a strong work ethic.

 Well-meaning parents may enable a troubled child and miss the boat on a talented one. Either way, if the family narrative does not capture the truth and members are mislabeled with negative qualities, lowself-esteem and identity confusion can ensue. Not being seen, understood or heard creates emotional distress. Ken suffered from headaches, depressions, and an “ongoing anxiety.”  The bad feeling never went away. Home was not a peaceful place.

 What is a psychotic family?  A general definition of psychotic would include not being in touch with reality. Classically, this can take the form of delusions or hallucinations—thinking that people are conspiring against you, hearing voices, seeing things.  These are extreme symptoms and often the result of biological conditions such as schizophrenia, mania, or very severe depression.  

 But there can be softer signs of psychosis that involve a different kind of poor reality testing. Distorted thought processes can stem from acculturation or indoctrination. In other words the “off”-ness can be environmentally induced. Dysfunctional families, cultures or communities such as colts can be ruled by an erroneous set of beliefs, promulgated by a powerful authority figure. Members drink the Kool-Aid. When one who thinks or sees otherwise or is mistreated speaks up, he or she may be met with dismissal, denial, criticism or punishment. It is “crazy-making” because the healthier person can be pegged as the pathological one.     

 Concerns may be met with, “No, he didn’t, you are exaggerating, you imagined it, she didn’t mean it, he said you did that to him, why are you making such a big deal, what is wrong with you, or go to your room for making such an accusation ” This pushback can conjure an overwhelming sense of helplessness, hopelessness, depression and anger.

 A severely dysfunctional or “psychotic” family is “not in touch” with reality in the sense that they dismiss it. This is not a biological problem, but rather a choice based on character, personality structure, greed, fragile ego, sadism, etc. Healthier, truth-seeing members with fewer sadistic traits and greater individuation do best by leaving when they are able to do so. Sometimes the whole family system is disturbed and distorted. Therapeutic interventions might help but sometimes an exit is called for. This allows for a far better future with a family of one’s own, however defined or created.

 Seven Suggestions for Dealing With Family Trauma:

1. Tolerate the disappointment
2. Hold on to your truth
3. Seek help outside the circle
4. Separate from the situation
5. Substitute old relationships with new ones
6. Avoid getting into discussions with PWPI (People with poor insight)
7. Define who you are and what you do anew.

 Great boundaries leads to better lives.

 Here are some interesting descriptions of troubled and optimal families:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-me-in-we/201311/5-styles-family-relating

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/27/your-money/what-the-most-fortunate-learn-during-the-holiday-season.html?_r=1 

 "A dysfunctional family is a family in which conflict, misbehavior, and often child neglect or abuse on the part of individual parents occur continually and regularly, leading other members to accommodate such actions. Children sometimes grow up in such families with theunderstanding that such an arrangement is normal. "(Wikipedia)