MEM's GCE Portfolio: Real or Not Real?

This Action Project is for unit 2 of our STEAM class, Disease, which focuses a lot on physical and mental diseases. For this unit, we learned a lot about mental disorders, specifically OCD, Schizophrenia, and Autism. We took a look at the DSM-V (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), which holds information collected by hundreds of mental health experts, to learn more about the main three disorders that we studied as a class. Along with that, we read a book called The Reason I Jump by Naoki Higashida which focused on a young boy with Autism. This unit taught us a lot about the connection between the mind and the body and how that affects the brainwaves in our minds. We also did an experiment with ourselves where we wrote down what we did for two days, matched brainwaves with those activities, and then graphed them. Below, you'll see a graph of brainwaves for our class pertaining to this project.

For this AP, everybody in our class was supposed to look through the DSM-V and find a disorder they wanted to focus on for their project. For mine, I chose Delusional Disorder, which is related to Schizophrenia. I chose this because it was what most caught my eye and I've always been interested in learning about Schizophrenia. The medical definition as stated by the Cleveland Clinic is, "Delusional disorder, previously called paranoid disorder, is a type of serious mental illness -- called a 'psychosis' -- in which a person cannot tell what is real from what is imagined. This is unlike people with other psychotic disorders, who also might have delusions as a symptom of their disorder."

If I were to define it in my own words, I would define it as a state in which someone can't differentiate reality from their own imagination; It includes delusions but is different from other disorders because it doesn't contain any other symptoms of psychosis. Three DSM-V criteria for this disorder are, "The presence of one or more delusions for at least a month", "If mood episodes occur concurrently with the delusions, the total duration of these mood episodes is brief relative to the total duration of the delusional periods", and, "The delusions re not attributable to the physiological effects of a medical condition (eg. Alzheimer's disease) and are not better explained by another mental disorder, such as body dysmorphic disorder or obsessive-compulsive disorder" (90). Delusional disorder also affects the right hemisphere of the brain. This is because the right side of the brain dominates self-recognition, emotional familiarity, and ego. An explanation by https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-01/nlmc-daw011309.php states that it, “...may cause delusions by disrupting the relation between the monitoring of psychic, emotional and physical self to people, places, and even body parts.”

For this presentation, I explained a little bit about Delusional disorder and then went straight into showing the class a video (credit to my friend, ES for giving me the idea). The video was called The Tucker Zone and it worked as a simulation for delusions because it plays with your imagination and makes you think that what you see is real or happening right there in the room. When I asked the students how they felt, they mainly talked about how the experience seemed very real and how certain parts were triggering for them. I then created a graph using my lesson plan for the brainwaves of the students during my presentation, along with a piecewise function for that graph. The last thing I did was to create a flyer that gives a summarization of the disorder and provides more context, recommendations of support, etc.

I hope you enjoy my project!

Lesson Plan: