Case Sutdy 7

Case Study 7: A 35-year-old clothing salesman was showing a particularly fussy customer a suit 2 months ago and suddenly began to sweat profusely. His heart started to pound, he felt dizzy, and became fearful that he was about to die. The customer didn’t notice his condition and continued to question him about the suit in minute detail. The patient, feeling faint, abruptly left the customer and went to lie down in the back of the store. The customer became insulted, complained to the manager, and left. When the manager found the patient he was slumped in a chair in the back room trembling. Approximately 10 minutes later the patient’s symptoms began to subside. He saw his physician the next day who found no evidence of any medical problems. Two weeks later, he had another similar unexpected attack. Since that time he has worried continuously about having another attack. His friends and colleagues have noticed that he is no longer as spontaneous and outgoing as he had been in the past.

This patient has a condition of social phobia, which is unreasonable fear of exposure to social situations, such as having contact with strangers. This fear may affect the person's normal routine.

For therapy for this patient, he needs to be able to conquer his fear for turning others mad or frustrated. In order to do so, he should start with helping customers that have the same questions as the fussy man, but that are more calm. Once he is able to be able to answer correctly and help these people, it is only a matter of changing the types of people he attends to. He should gradually start helping more aggitated people, even if it is manipulated, in order to get rid of his social anxiety.

I colclude that this man is suffering from social anxiety for many reasons. First of all, he has an anxiety attack because of contact with a person and a situation rather than an object. Second of all, supporting evidence shows that this may alter his normal routine, which his friends said have changed since he has had these attacks. The customer he was attending to was very fussy, and didn't recognize the mans problems, which shows that he only cares about his suit. He persists to ask very minute and specific questions that a salesperson might have a hard time answering. Out of his fear of not satisfying the customer, the salesperson became anxious and thus is suffering from social anxiety.

Famous Psychological Problem

Vincent Van Gogh is one of the world's best painters. He was a post-impressionist painter, who didn't really take up the career of painting until around 1880, when he was 27 years old. He created 2000 pieces of artwork in the last ten years of his life, but his most well-known paintings came from the last two years of his life, which were plagued by depression and many psychological problemsfollowin the breakdown of his friendship. One of his most famous paintings is The Starry Night.

Scientist were are still unaware of what psychological disorder he suffered from, proposing that is was schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, syphillis, and many other disorders. These proposed disorders actually affected his works a great deal. Scientis proposed that his love and use of the color yellow is a result of an alcohol problem, which caused his brain to see objects in yellow. Another proposal is the use of lead based paints which caused his retina wo widen, causing the halo-effects we see in his paintings. Whatever the cause of his problems and the problem itself, they influenced Van Gogh's artwork greatly.

Not knowing the exact disorder of Van Gogh, it is hard for me to give my opinion on how I feel about it. However, I can say that whatever the disorder was, I believe it was key to his artistic publicity. He was a phenominal artist, but only his works that were done during his period of psychological illness' were what made him famous. I think that the disorder's should have had more recognition back then, since we cannot even identify what it was today. His suicide proves that his disorders were not paid attention to, but I feel that the disorders are gaining much more recognition today.

Link

Link 2 - Wikipedia