Description of Madness from Psychology and Psychological Counselling Students

The aim of this research is to reveal the phenomenon of madness of psychology and psychological counseling students at the 4th year of the university in order to objectify the perspective of the new generation of the... [ view full abstract ]

The aim of this research is to reveal the phenomenon of madness of psychology and psychological counseling students at the 4^th year of the university in order to objectify the perspective of the new generation of the psychology about psychological disorders under the discourse of "madnesss". 20 undergraduate students from psychology and psychological counseling departments of universities in Istanbul are asked to discuss different topics about madness, treatment of psychological disorders, social aspects of psychological disorders and stigma. Topics are given to the students through a web site with the same format as collaborative dictionary, a sort of web site that members can discuss a topic through web, which is opened by the researchers. This web site has some ground rules that are developed by the researchers. Participants are warned if they are being mean, rude or hurtful to other participants, and are asked to watch over racist, sexist language in their discussion entries. Every participant is asked to choose a nick name and they have an account that only they can access with their nickname and password. Thereby, participants will be able to discuss anonymously that week’s subject through the web site. Every week a new discussion is started by the researchers and participants discuss this topic. They are asked to discuss seven topics in seven weeks. After seven week time period is completed, the web site is closed and students are stopped from writing more comments and thoughts about the subjects. Students are allowed to write comments about previous weeks’ subjects until the web site is closed. After data collection process is done, the answers from the same participants are collected under their nickname and qualitative data from each participant is analyzed with interpretative phenomenological analysis with MaxQda program.