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The Portable Psychologist

© Michael Decaire

Well, my schooling is over and I am now working within a psychiatric hospital environment. I am working in forensics in a research capacity at the moment (I am actually doing dissertation related assessments at the moment). However, I have been preparing myself over the last little while for this move into the clinical realm. I thought I would take a chance this month to share with everyone a little idea I decided to pursue to aid in my clinical work.

The story begins with myself winning a bid on eBay for a Palm Pilot. For those individuals that do not know what a Palm is, the palm pilot is a small hand held computer which runs at about 16mhz and has an 8mb storage capacity (specifics will vary slightly from that). The palm is most commonly used as an organizer, used as an electronic date book, email, memo, and basic management device. However, the simplicity (well simple to advanced computer users) of programming for the palm’s operating system has led to literally hundreds of programs available for the system (see http://www.download.com for about a thousand). Also, many will be happy to know that the majority (99% maybe) are free.

So what does this have to do with forensic psychology? Well it started (for me) with the idea that I would type out my treatment guidelines for the different type of mental disorders I may come across on a forensics ward. By using a simple text editor I typed up a list of treatment procedures for virtually every disorder I could think of. By sending the information to my palm (it takes up virtually no space since it was simply created with notepad) I could go through the treatment guidelines on there whenever I needed to. Additionally, I had the added benefit of being able to use the ‘find’ button to search for certain passages. I was fairly pleased with myself and after a little patting on the back decided I’d peak online to see what kind of goodies I could find for my system.

Well after a jaunt around download.com I found out that I wasn’t quite as original in my idea. I found several mental health related palm add-ons. One of the particularly more useful (especially for those working within a general hospital setting) is diagnostic code generators for the ICD-9. The ICD-9 is the universal diagnostic manual of diseases, it includes all medical disorders and mental disorders. While I would prefer a DSM-IV diagnostic code list the ICD-9 is definitely applicable to working within a hospital context. I have yet to find an add-on with the diagnostic criteria for disorders (such a program could possibly be a copyright violation) but I'm sure it does exist. It would not be too difficult to also type one up for your own personal use. Imagine having the criteria to every DSM mental disorder in a little searchable database in your hand.