interview journal #1

*poof* back. I was approved to put my interview journal online

9/7/2006
So I'm supposed to keep a journal of my interviewing experience, so I decided that I wanted to just share w/ my friends here. I'll be mainly focusing on myself and my reactions because I can't say anything specific about the patients blahblahblah.

Today was my first interviewing experience and it was interesting. I didn't really know what to expect out of it, I guess I didn't really think about it too much because then I would have psyched myself out and gotten nervous. Much like the way I treated the whole medical school application process. I still got nervous, but I didn't become a psychopath about it. My group was assigned to the psychiatric inpatient ward and we will be interviewing patients for a few weeks. When I first heard we were going to interview psychiatric patients, I was a little apprehensive, but after discussing it with my peers and hearing about other groups, I felt lucky to have such an interesting demographic. And after todays experience, I'm very glad that I have this opportunity to interview patients at this unique place.

When I first walked into the psychiatric ward, all the stereotypes rushed into my mind and I felt bad about it. But I think it was only natural, since I've never been in such a setting. Everything looked normal, which should not be surprising, but I guess I didn't really think about it before. They had sets of locked double doors, like ones you would pass through to go to a dust free environment, except this wasn't to keep dust in or out. Our patient was an interesting person who kept talking and talking. He came in very energetic and immediately started talking about himself and his life story. I thought "wow this is going to be easy if he just comes out and tells us everything." However, It was difficult for the assigned interviewer to ask questions because none of us really knew how to interrupt the patient in a polite manner. He was talking about things that were not relevant to us as medical professionals practicing medical interviewing skills, so we really needed to direct him to tell us more relevant information. After a while he became more comfortable and we were able to ask some questions to find out more about the patient and his condition. He said he was in the hospital for depression and I believed everything he said. I learned that I need to take things with a grain of salt and think about what I'm hearing rather than just believe anything that anyone says. There were some far fetched stories, but I didn't really take a step back and think about them until afterwards, when our group got together and discussed our experience with our first interview. It turns out our patient had a more serious condition because he was admitted to the hospital. Depression is not severe enough to warrant a hospital stay.

I didn't get a chance to ask any questions because I wasn't able to interrupt our patient when he was speaking. And later when there was a little bit of dead time, the question I wanted to ask was no longer relevant and seemed out of place. Next week I will be the main interviewer which will be kind of exciting, and kind of nerve wracking. I thought everyone asked really good questions this week, and I hope I can do the same.

that's it, I think that was pretty vague. I hope I don't get in trouble... I'll probably take this down after a few days but I want to let friends back home read about it.