Life Events on the Major Stressor Scale c. 2011

2010 Review
January 2010
X's father becomes gravely ill. X goes to his bedside.
February 2010
Father of X passes away in early February.  X stops looking at me and pretends I am not in the room. I ask him about it and he says that he's really busy and so on.  I agree. He apologizes for being distracted and I say that I understand.
March 2010
My only aunt passed away after a dreadful illness that left us gasping in horror at her slow, savage demise.  I went to my cousins' and stayed with them before and after.  I used to send her, "to my Favorite Aunt" cards for decades. Ten years ago, she pointed out to me that she was my ONLY aunt.  We laughed, a lot. My cousin's son's wedding was held three days after her death. It was too late to move it.
April 2010
May 2010
June 2010
Charly tells me he doesn't have much time left.
July 2010
X and I go to his mother's home to see him and to gather his intellectual property on his Project to Enforce the Geneva Conventions.
Charly passes on July 14
August 2010
September 2010
I pointed out to X and my business partner that I had no time to take care of my personal business. Instead of helping me, there was a big fight.
October 2010
My right ankle ceased to function.  I had to get a motel in San Francisco because it hurt too badly to drive the 60 miles home.
November 2010
I need upper dentures.
December 2010
I have ankle surgery on Dec. 1
I have all my upper teeth pulled and an immediate denture inserted on Dec. 6
I came down with a bad case of the flu on Dec. 9

January 2011

• Recovered slowly from the trifecta of leg surgery, complete upper tooth extraction, and a nasty case of the flu. Whenever the weather was nice, I would walk. 

February 2011

• My long-delayed trip to see my son and his family in North Carolina finally came about mid-February. It was a nice trip. I had a great time with my little grandson, his mama, and my son. They are always very patient with me when I visit.  Things like this sometimes happen: 
• Automobile totalled: On the night before my trip back to California, a crazy man came up to my son's front door. He had crashed into my fortuitously empty, legally-parked rental car and totalled it. It was so badly totalled that it could not be towed by a regular tow-truck. It only had 500 miles on the odometer. I nearly missed my flight home due to the logistical difficulties the next day.
• Left knee became unusable: This happens to me often, due to an old (football injury) auto accident, or MVA, as they call it in doctorland.  It was excruciating. I did physical therapy at home for a couple of weeks.  When that did not ease the painful stab/ache combo, I sought medical treatment. 

March 2011

• I broke my nose because my left knee collapsed. I fell on my face.  When I told X what had happened and showed him the foot-wide blood stain on the concrete, he shrugged.  He never asked me how my nose was. 
• My kneecap was dislocated.  
• Medical Doctor listened to my knee symptoms and mocked them. My primary physician got me a new specialist within days. I got treatment, but I had now been immobilized by pain for 6 weeks. 

April 2011

• My knee improved.
• April 7:  I became terribly ill while on a business trip.  I called X and asked him if I should stay away.  He told me to come home. I drove home. I was violently ill with chills and fever, nausea and vomiting, and excruciating body pain. Two weeks later,  I had to leave home because X, although well-intentioned, was unable to stand the pressure of caring for me.  He made constant noise and saw to my comfort only grudgingly. He should have taken me to the hospital.  Because:

• I had pneumonia.
• I had to leave home and check myself into a hotel while running a temperature because X was freaking out, two weeks into my illness. I moved into The Sweetwater Cottage two days later. I was able to pack enough so that I could sleep comfortably, and cook. 
• I start coughing up blood.
• I got treatment for my pneumonia, but it would be two months before I appeared normal to those who knew me. It was nice on the property. More than 20 trees adorn the half-acre. The air was filled with birdsong. I felt filled with lead. I slept 16 hours a day.

May 2011

• X came to the property several days later, changed things around he didn't like, sat down, leaned back, and asked me what I was cooking him for dinner.  

July 2011

• Two days before X's homewarming party, X hired a crew to "trim" the score of trees on the property.  They instead wreaked havoc on them, destroying most of our shade and despoiling an ancient bird habitat home to dozens of species.  I cried.  The next morning, when I awoke, all the birdsong was gone. I cried some more.  
• Repairing an electrical malfunction cost us four days of preparation time, but X said he was too tired to help me during the three-day run-up to the party. So I did all the shopping, cleaning and arranging by myself.  Anything that X did, he did so grudgingly. The party was a roaring success.  People asked us to have another one.  I asked X if I could hire help for the next one. 
• Three days after the party, X asked me to help him install a heavy piece of equipment.  His reckless movements resulted in the equipment landing on my left hand.  The first three days were hell.  Then the pain began to subside and I realized that the bones were not broken; they were crushed.  So I wrapped the fingers in adhesive tape, and pressed on.  Typing caused me pain for a couple of months. Knowing me, you know that my life comes out through my fingers and onto the keyboard. 

August 2011

• Crushed bones in right hand and wrist. X struck me with a 2x4 while I was holding another 2x4, which crushes bones in my wrist and hand; after which
• X does not help me even though I can't use either hand well. When I asked for help, he got peevish. 
• My relationship with X ends; he says that he doesn't feel free.   I don't buy his argument because he is dating 3 other women at the time with my consent and without inconveniencing me. Nevertheless I acquiesce because I have decided that we should not spend time together any more.  It is dangerous to my health.

September 2011

• A visit to family reveals that my uncle is dying and some of the people associated with this are out of touch with reality, and I mean that in a bad way.  I worry that one of my relatives is psychotic.  

October 2011

• Going crazy still living on X's property, looked for apartments in a 200-square mile area that will do as far as rent and space.

November 2011

• Moving to Oakland apartment, one van-load at a time.  Every day is a better day!  The work is hard, but I am able to organize as I unpack. 
• Am completing a project that I started in October 2009.

Androgyny Study Based on Sandra Bem's work (Intellectual Androgyny)

I discovered while taking a course in Human Relations at SFSU in the Masters in Public Administration program that I am "androgynous." Not that you can't tell that I am a woman by looking at me, but rather that my brain operates successfully in areas considered both male and female. It is an advantage in life, as explained below.

http://www.garysturt.free-online.co.uk/bem.htm

The Measurement of Psychological Androgyny

Sandra L Bem (1974)

Bem views Androgyny to mean both highly masculine and highly feminine, rather than neither masculine nor feminine (i.e. midway between the two extremes).

It's better to be androgynous in today's society as men and women need to be adaptable, and willing to share all types of jobs, without saying that one job is woman's work or another job is just for men.


Construction

The final inventory consists of three groups of 20 items. The three groups being Masculine, Feminine and Neutral.

Selection of items

Two Hundred personality traits that were masculine or feminine, but were neutral in social desirability were chosen by Bem and some of her students. Likewise a further 200 personality traits that were either socially desirable or socially undesirable were chosen. These traits had to apply equally to both males and females.

One Hundred students then rated these traits by answering the following question format: "In American society, how desirable is it for a man to be truthful?". Half of the students (50) were asked about men, and half were asked about women. There was an equal number of men and women in both groups. {Note the word 'truthful' was replaced with all the other 399 trait words in turn.}. The scale used was 1 = not at all desirable, 7 = extremely desirable. Only items that were judged to be significantly more desirable for one gender than the other were considered for inclusion in the inventory (BSRI). Both male and female judges had to agree. Likewise, neutral items were those that were judged to be neither masculine nor feminine, by judges of both genders. The twenty most 'feminine' traits, the twenty most 'masculine' traits, the ten most neutral (for gender) undesirable traits and the ten most neutral desirable traits make up the BSRI (Bem Sex Role Inventory).

Note the good methodology. Bem uses male and female judges in equal proportions. Both have to agree. Four Hundred potential traits are cut down to 60. So plenty of items were considered. One Hundred judges should overcome the problem of having a biased sample. However, note the judges were university undergraduates. This means most were between the ages of 18 and 21. Note also how Bem ensures she has a test with face validity, because the items are selected on their face value in the first place! You might be tempted to criticise Bem's sentence that is used by the judges. The sentence does ask for a judgement of desirability. This could lead to subjects giving high masculinity ratings and high femininity ratings. In turn this would lead to a low androgyny score (which means highly androgynous). If this is so experimenter bias has taken place. Bem would demonstrate that androgyny is more prevalent than it really is. Bem did find from her normative data (see below), that although social desirability (as determined from her 'neutral' items) correlated with masculinity and femininity, it did not correlate with androgyny.

Administration

The actual inventory used to appear here but I have been asked to remove the inventory by the copyright owners. 

(NB--There is an androgyny test at http://www.okcupid.com/ .  I score 90% masculine and 73% feminine.  I am a heterosexual female who delights in keeping up my nail polish and other feminine froufrous, and am in appearance quite feminine.  No, I will not link you to my results or my profile, unless you are a single man living in the Bay area and interested in dating a polymath.  OKCUPID is free, fun, and full of geeks and nerds.)

Instructions
Number the adjectives with a number from 1 to 7, reflecting the degree to which you think the adjective applies to you.

1 Means always or almost always untrue

7 means always or almost always true.

4 means half true and half untrue.

Try to use all the numbers in the scale.

The scale is supposed to be scored by using an inferential statistical test (the t test, but you don't have to know anything about this test!). The t value, derived from the test, represents the difference in assessment between the masculine and feminine items. For simplicity the androgyny score can be defined as the average feminine rating minus the average masculine rating. Note that it is a little confusing because a low androgyny score means that the subject is highly androgynous, and vice versa.

Bem has built into her scale a check to see whether it is likely the subject is simply trying to give a favourable impression of themselves. If the ten socially desirable 'neutral' items are given high ratings, and the ten socially undesirable 'neutral' items are given low ratings, then it is likely the subject is trying to give a good impression of themselves. Another advantage of the neutral items is that it helps to pad out the inventory somewhat; This reduces demand characteristics. Subjects will be less aware of which category each item belongs to.

Normative Data.

It is important to collect normative data from a large number of subjects, so that an average score and standard deviation can be obtained for each dimension of the scale (that is masculinity, femininity, androgyny and Social Desirability. Only by comparison to others can an individual's score have any meaning. For example, an IQ score of 100 is meaningless, unless you know that the average IQ score is also 100. Students, mostly between the ages of 16 and 21 were used; 444 male and 279 female students from Stanford University, and 117 male and 77 female students from Foothill Junior college. This may mean that the normative data might only apply to this age group. Perhaps more pertinently, the students of this time (1974) would probably have held different values from those students of today. Would students of today rate 'conventional' as socially undesirable? If your teacher is over 40, ask them to describe what it was like in the seventies! Additionally, these were Americans; How would British students rate the BSRI? Would they see 'aggression' as a desirable masculine trait, for example?

Reliability

social desirability

Bem found that although there was a high correlation between masculinity or femininity and social desirability, there was no correlation between androgyny and social desirability. This shows that the inventory is measuring something other than social desirability.

Test-Retest

Twenty-Eight males and 28 females are retested after an interval of four weeks. High correlations are found for Femininity, Masculinity, Androgyny and Social Desirability.

Split-Half or internal Consistency

For both samples (Stanford and Foothill), half of the Femininity items correlated with the remaining half. The same goes for Masculinity, Androgyny and Social Desirability.

Validity

Face validity

Because the trait items were thought to be desirable for either men or women by 100 judges, one could say that face validity was built into the BSRI. It is a pity that the judges were not asked to judge the 'neutral' traits for social desirability. Those traits that fell half-way between masculine and feminine were used for the social desirability scale. It was the initial selectors (Bem and Students) who decided upon whether the items were desirable or not. Can we be sure about the social desirability of traits such as 'unpredictable' or 'conventional'?

Content Validity

The items on the test were not studied.

Criterion-Related Validity

Concurrent

Bem did not try to find out whether each person was in real life as the BSRI predicted. Are highly androgynous men happy to change a baby's nappies?

Predictive

Bem would have had to wait to see whether all of her androgynous people were successful in life. Bem felt that it was best to be androgynous, as one could be more adaptable to the demands of modern life. Perhaps it is now the time to test for predictive reliability! How would you go about that?

Correlations with the other measures of masculinity-femininity

The BSRI results were compared against results obtained from the California psychological inventory and the Guilford-Zimmerman temperament survey. There was no correlation between the BSRI and the Guilford-Zimmerman scale and only a moderate correlation between the BSRI and the California psychological inventory. This suggests that Bem is measuring something different from the other personality tests.

http://www.garysturt.free-online.co.uk/bem.htm

Read the study at the link above, and see other source material.

androgyny...who knew?

by Deborah Lake

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Androgyny

Noooo, not like Sheldon in Big Bang Theory! Sheldon is asexual, not androgynous!

Androgynous people do not occupy some vast sexual wasteland.

Rather, androgynous people's thought processes do not conform to culturally-assigned roles. I always thought that there was something "wrong" with the way I thought, because I did not think "like a man" or "like a woman."

Some people think that I write like a man. I do not consciously write like I belong to any gender.

Despite having been warned that my mental omnivorousness would not help me find a husband, I remain primarily attracted to men. I would prefer that this condition did not exist. However, I had no choice in the matter. I did not awaken one morning and decide to be heterosexual.

So, I am content to rest for now and wait for someone to meet who is taking the same path as me.

ADD/ADHD in dogs and geeks

by Deborah Lake

Many of my friends have the condition that the world calls attention deficit disorder. Some treat it, some do not. Those who do not treat it are miserable; those who treat it are less miserable than those who do not. But all of them are champions of social justice, regardless of the personal cost.

I had to diagnose MYSELF with attention deficit disorder at the age of 56. Five months ago. Since then, the lives of my son, my best friends in real life, and my best friends in chat, have all improved immeasurably.

No psychiatrist, therapist, or other professional over the last 25 years noticed my condition, although they noticed that I was there asking for help to figure out what the heck was wrong with me! None of these people were aware that women can have ADD...and that many people with ADD do not have ADHD. I was not HYPER!!!!

I kept doing my own research. Located a book called, "Delivered from Distraction". Halleluhjah!

Guess what? Many people who have ADD are the furthest thing from hyper that you have ever seen.

In 1994, at the age of 43 maybe, I told the first decent doctor that I had ever had that I was depressed. That doctor thoughtfully prescribed Prozac. He was an internist, and did not practice outside of his field. But he made a good choice. That was all that was available at the time that agreed with me.

In 1997, I went back to school full time, passed algebra, left my abusive husband, and was accepted to UC Santa Barbara and UC Santa Cruz with very nice scholarships. I did my best to help my daughter. It was not enough. I was not qualified. She always ended up hating me for whatever I did, so I finally decided to leave and finish my education, so that I could better help her when she was ready for my help.

I graduated near the top of my class, and was accepted to UC Hastings. I graduated with my class from UC Hastings, at the age of 54. I was the first college graduate in my family.

No fairy dust for deb...despite the fact that I broke my leg, in two places, on Nov. 1 of the first semester of law school, and had to be in a wheelchair for the remainder of the semester, I still finished with my class!!!! My apartment caught on fire right before the finals. It was full of toxic ash. I had to live in a motel room, containing the most dreadful chairs on earth, while studying for and taking the most important tests of my life. I barely survived that year, academically, and that's all I cared about. Yet, I still finished with my class!!!!

In January of 2008, I educated my wonderful psychiatrist in ADD, female non-hyper style. He now has more knowledge with which to help me. I have finally been freed of the burdens of the terrible crises of the last few months; I may not have survived without the additional help. I have finally been freed of the inability to reliably control my daily actions, as well.

Every day is a better day.

Extreme bias: a mental disorder?

Damn straight.

Psychiatry ponders whether extreme bias can be an illness. Of course it is. Have you ever driven anywhere with a peace sign affixed to your car? I have. As a result of my simple exercise in self-expression, I have been closely followed, boxed in, and suffered various other forms of vehicular intimidation while traveling at 70 miles an hour.

A few months ago, after two young people were RUN OVER BY A TRUCK at a rally in Garden Grove, CA, I wrote an article titled Driving While Peaceful. In it, I described several incidents I personally witnessed wherein some crazy rightwingnut threatened perfectly innocent people with suffering and death.

Here ya go:

I was driving into the city the other day. I was in the fast lane in preparation to transition to another freeway. I glanced in my rearview mirror, and saw a large vehicle close on my tail. I speeded up thinking that I could open space between us.

No good. The vehicle stayed right on my bumper. I considered tapping the brake pedal, but feared that would lead to a traffic hazard. Next I knew, the vehicle was only about three feet back. My adrenalin surged in anticipation of a collision. Rather, he changed lanes in the narrowest space imaginable, and pressed ahead of me in the lane to my right, nearly sideswiping me.


Now, what could explain such dangerous behavior? The vehicle was a Ford Expedition, the hugest piece of polluting iron that Ford makes. The Expedition averages 13 mpg on premium fuel. I had a peace sign on my rear window. He had an American Flag on his. Oh, you could try to explain this by surmising that he was in a terrible hurry to get somewhere. But it seemed not. He simply pulled a carlength ahead and stayed there for four miles, until his offramp appeared.

This is not the first time that I have been vehicularly intimidated due to my plea for peace. I travel down a major interstate several times a year to visit family. Seldom do more than a hundred miles go by without some jerk in a big car or pickup truck either sitting on my bumper or pacing me so they can stare at me.

Here's my question. Now what on earth would make people so angry that they would risk a traffic collision? The idea of peace? The idea that I want it? The idea that I say that I want it publicly?

Why are those who are most anxious to declare their patriotism the angriest at me? At least 75% of the time, these angry drivers have American Flags on their windows, bumpers, or on their antennas. And I look about as american as anyone else.

If I could hear what they were saying it bet it would sound something like this: I bet she's oneathem America-haters. I would like to dispute that contention. I am an American who seeks peace. How can I be an America-hater when I am American? Next, someone will call me a self-hating American. Giggle.

This is not the first time I have noted this bad behavior. After the 2000 election debacle, I was standing in front of my local courthouse with other concerned Americans talking about what happened. Community leaders had called a meeting. Some of the people were standing near the curb. I watched in horror as an gray-haired white man in a Jeep Wrangler aimed his vehicle along the curbline and accelerated to 60 miles an hour. Many people had to fling themselves out of his path.

Now, I bet he thinks he is just a regular American patriot. But I wonder what his defense would have been in the Court Room had he injured or killed someone in his fit of rage.

Unfortunately, injuries occurred in the last public incident, near Los Angeles. A supporter of the Minutemen struck two young people with his vehicle, then ran. What a hero!

As I was driving home from school one afternoon in 2003, I sat behind a Mercedes Benz. We were stopped at a light. An elderly homeless woman's shopping cart projected slightly into the crosswalk. When the light turned green, the Mercedes driver aimed his car directly at her cart as he accelerated, then swerved at the last minute.

Now, after he did that, I wonder if he thought to himself...I must be crazy.