To be honest, I know very little about my subject in the grand scheme of things. Sure, I’ve taken psychology classes before, so I could say that I am knowledgeable, but in reality, there are a multitude of things that I don’t know and probably will never know about psychology and psychiatry even though I am planning to pursue both professionally. There is so much knowledge, so many studies, so many theories, phenomenons, and questions that it would take multiple lifetimes to learn it all. So yes, I may know more than the average person about adolescent psychology and psychiatry, but I know cosmically little in comparison to what is out there. 

What I do know is both from classes and experience. For example, I know that my essential question – how do psychology and psychiatry intertwine in terms of the adolescent experience – has some validity to it (it is logical and has an ‘answer’). Both psychology and psychiatry do in fact intertwine when it comes to adolescence. But the way in which they do this is more complicated than any textbook that I’ve ever read could explain. In order to understand the connection, one must understand the basics of psychology and psychiatry(behaviorism, Pavlov, personality, emotion, depression, alleles, genes, things like that) and what it means to be an adolescent. But there’s the problem: there’s no one way to be an adolescent. Sure there are stereotypes and movie tropes that one could play along to, but there is no textbook definition of what it means to be a teenager. So my understanding of both topics could differ from someone else’s; sure we both have the same building blocks (the knowledge of psychology and psychiatry), but our understanding of adolescence could be completely different. 

One question that I have arrived at during my research is: what is an answer? For a question like mine, there is no true answer, no true ending to the ‘story’ that I have been uncovering. With each new study comes a new chapter, one chapter may rewrite another when a new theory refutes another. Some older chapters don’t make any sense at all from our modern standpoint, but they belong in the ‘book’ nevertheless. So to ‘answer’ my question is practically impossible. All that I can do is share what I have learned and morph it into a faux answer. 

This idea of a faux answer has caused me to question what I am doing. If there is no answer, what am I looking for? I know that I should trust the process, keep my head down, and do the work, but another part of me wants to do the exact opposite. The work feels meaningless if the answer won’t be genuine. And the problem is that no answer to this question can be genuine. Sure, I could dumb it down and come up with an ‘answer’ to make myself and others happy, but that just seems wrong. So yes, I will continue researching, but to what end?