Confronting the Ophelia Syndrome

If I could describe my experience in graduate school with one word it would be "initiative."  At this point in my life, everything is up to to me in my education.  I no longer rely on my professors' treating me like their baby or novice apprentice.  I don't eat out of the palms of anyones' hands either.  Because I've learned to analyze data and the reliability of research, an element of skepticism is a part of my thinking process now more than ever before.

Due dates, margins, font size, number of pages, etc. are finally not a part of my priorities--I can't afford to sweat about them anymore.  I especially have experienced this while transitioning my thesis from what it was (religion and disabilities) to what it is now: an experience in India at the Karuna home.  I realize in accepting and embracing my new thesis and going on this field study that there is no place for the Ophelia syndrome in my life.  I truly feel confronted by it daily, in each assignment I complete, in each article I read, as I check off "nuisance" items on my "To Do List."  I cannot afford to be "chronically ignorant" or submissive at this point.  At this point in my life I will be differentiating myself from others, as Carl Jung said, in a much deeper and useful manner.

One treatment in the article that I still struggle with is Treatment 3: Learn to Live with Uncertainty.  It's okay to surrender the need for absolute truth.  Not everything can be explained, nor does it need to be!  In my research I keep hoping for absolutes--and quick absolutes, at that--but find very little.  Graduate research is all about painting the most accurate picture possible with a bunch of non-absolutes.  It's analyzing and synthesizing information that may not all add up.  My struggle right now is in finding the most truth possible, and creating a readable piece about said truth.

A treatment I'd really like to implement is Treatment 5: Foster Idle Thinking.  I think I do this inadvertently when I abandon schoolwork to leave the house on a run or to talk with a friend.  I describe it as leaving my ineffective work only to return shortly after my run/walk/or diddling around to my "zone."  It seems like when I abandon schoolwork that is being completed at an nonextistent rate to just stare at a wall that I'm able to return with the ability to work at a rapid pace with more quality work.  I suppose I've attacked Ophelia in acquiring this treatment method, althouth I used to think of myself as being lazy.

I'm going to keep attacking Ophelia, even though it makes me tired to be an adult.

Cross-Cultural Comparison of the Concept of "Otherness" and its Impact on Persons with Disabilities

Murdick, N., Shore, P., & Chittooran, M. M. (2004). Cross-cultural comparison of the concept of “otherness” and its impact on persons with disabilities. Education and Training in Developmental Disabilities, 39(4), 310-316.

•  According to Smart (2001), “perceptions of disability labels, expectations of people with disabilities, and ascribed meanings of the experience of disability are all shaped by the broader culture” (p. 71). (p. 311).
•  However, reactions against the “other” who is disabled appear to be more extreme in the Western world, than they are in India, where attitudes toward those who are disabled have ranged from reverence to embarrassment to a fatalistic acceptance of the disability, either because children with disabilities were viewed as a divine gift to parents who had been entrusted with their care or because they were viewed as divine retribution for parental wrong-doing (p. 313).
•  Historically, care of individuals with disabilities in India has been left to families and most services for this population have been provided through private, charitable, or non-governmental organizations (p. 314).
•  Attitudes about individuals with disabilities in India have “ranged from reverence to embarrassment to a fatalistic acceptance of the disability, either because children with disabilities were viewed as a devine gift to parents who had been entrusted with their care or because they were viewed as divine retribution for parental wrong-doing” (Murdick, Shore, & Chitooran, 2004, p. 313).  Even though the range of attitudes is wide, most parents of children with disabilities experience negative feelings about their having a child with a disability.  This can result in decreased chances of gaining education, and a lower quality of life for the child with a disability, along with her parents.

Maintaining Direction

My literature review is getting quite messy and quite large in a not-so-useful way.  It’s packed full of information, but some of the information has no clear direction or transition from one topic to the next.  This “messiness” has been my major concern for the past week, and today in class we organized our ideas and sources visually in hopes of making connections that are sound, as well as identifying where gaps exist in the literature or concepts we’ve studied thus far.  I found as I created my visual that there were probably far too many gaps than I want.  I’m still not sure at what point in the literature I should stop searching, and which things should or shouldn’t be included in my final literature review, but at least I’m in the mindset of cleaning up my mess.  

My greatest concerns lie in the fact that there is so little concrete information about a variety of huge, yet essential, topics related to my study:

• Education in Tibet vs. education in India
• Education for Tibetan refugees in India
• Tibetans and Indians appear to go to both Tibetan and Indian schools…
• Educational learning expectations of special educators
• Quality and quantity of special educators and special education/services
• Understanding of diagnoses of individuals with disabilities in India
• Disability law in Tibet and India
• General public’s view on disability vs. professionals’ and practitioners’
• View on disability in general

This is just a small list of topics that are extremely underdeveloped, but also underlie some of the major themes of my project.  It’s hard to have a solid foundation as a literature review when the literature reviewed is so flimsy due to the fact that it's so few.  Nevertheless, this activity was extremely helpful for me to determine which aspects of the literature still need reviewing, and specific search words I can use.