The PsyCreative Column

- Joshita Gupta, MSc. FY Applied Psychology I’ve learned to read the silence. Not the comfortable quiet of a shared room, but the kind that feels heavy, like a dense fog. It’s in the way you look at a window, feeling like you're seeing a world that isn't yours anymore. It's in the way your laugh, once a full and vibrant sound, has become a fragile echo that seems to break as soon as it's born. I see you retreating, pulling the blinds on a soul that used to radiate warmth. Every small retreat is a quiet earthquake, and I feel the ground beneath me tremble. I see the war you're fighting, though it rages in silence. I see the invisible weight that sags your shoulders and the exhaustion that lives in your eyes. I want you to know that the empathy I feel for your pain is not a burden; it's a deep, profound reverence for what you are enduring. I am a mountain in your storm. I do not need to fight the wind for you; I only need to be here, an unshakable and quiet presen...

-By Parishi Shah “One must imagine Sisyphus happy”, wrote Albert Camus. We should be happy in the mundane, the absurd and the unknown; yet, what holds us back is our innate fallacy of the senses: the need to seek meaning in everything even when it might not have one. On the other hand, the universe is unempathetic and doesn’t provide us with meanings and explanations—even if it does, it is inexplicable to us humans. This contradiction between the secret nature of the universe and the human desire to create meaning gives birth to the feeling known as absurd. Now, there are certain things we do to shake off this ‘absurd’ feeling: we turn to religion and try to find a purpose through God or put on a mask of self-determination and try to make sense of things through science and logic. This act of trying to understand the unknown gives birth to Parapsychology.   What is Parapsychology? Parapsychology is a branch of psychology that studies phenomena outside the realm of quantifiability a...

Photo by Avargus on DeviantArt “Man sees God after his brain is turned off by science.” An odd sentence to come across, let alone process. But let’s set the scene—imagine your typical eerie laboratory of scientists whose passion borders obsession. There’s also the test subject, an elderly man who claimed he had ‘nothing to live for’. The first naturally arising question is simply, “why?”. In 1983, a group of scientists attempted to test a hypothesis, which stated that our five senses disrupt the unobstructed perception of the world, or rather, the world beyond. If we are not limited by our five senses, we would know more, and perhaps be able to communicate with God. As one can tell, the crux of experiment rests on the concept of sensory deprivation. What was expected (or hoped) to come out of this experiment, was that as the ties to the outside world get tethered, and as the mind starts closing in on itself, left alone in the void, it would create sensory experiences to compensate fo...

With the globalization of modern education and new scientific research, we often forget that the things we learn are centered around western data and research. Indian education, in the field of science, holds a concerning underrepresentation of its own population.  For example, we seem to think that life expectancy is on average approximately 72 years, right? Yet we fail to acknowledge that it is lower for India, at 67.3 years, as per WHO data from 2021. Life expectancy is something that concerns every single individual in the country, and if that too is something we are uninformed regarding, what about other issues that are not as common? Indians typically age faster than people in the west (Shome et al., 2020). We hear our parents complain about joint pain and worsening health in their 60s, which people in the west experience much later. This early aging opens a Pandora's box of problems much bigger than wrinkles or gray hair. For example, visual and auditory loss, decreased mobi...

Picture an infant, faced with some situations which are so treacherous and devastating that they would even pose a challenge to adults. Childhood Trauma is one of the most adverse events an individual can undergo. This ranges from domestic violence, neglect of their specific needs, abusive parental care, undergoing grief, or even sexual assault. These are just a few examples that can be faced by victims of early childhood trauma. This trauma leaves lifelong scars and affects one’s cognition and behavioral patterns in their lives later on too. It creates an astronomical wound in the victim’s well-being and shapes how they see and perceive themselves.  Trauma in childhood can stem from witnessing events that are alarming, threatening, and distressing. The most concerning part is, that these events affect the child before their cognition and emotional resilience are fully developed. Exposure to this trauma can trigger maladaptive coping mechanisms early on, which can be carried on wel...