Hello! "Parenthood" and Support Groups as Normalicy

With my first semester of graduate school underway I find that I need another outlet to dump stress, ideas, and questions other than friends, family, and my professors. Since I have awful handwriting a paper journal didn't seem like the best spot for noting anything I might want to re-read in the future, so hopefully this will be   a better alternative!

I'm working on my Masters in Interpersonal Communication in small town Wisconsin and will hopefully graduate in spring 2014.

While I typically focus on health communication today's inspiration came from watching the TV show Parenthood. It's one of my new favorite shows and I'm obsessively catching up with it on Netflix in any spare time I have. The show's portrayal of Max, a child with Asperger's, a social/behavioral disorder on the Autism spectrum typically annoys me because of the way the show implies it's okay for families to be so helpless and bend to the child's every whim. While I am in no way an expert, with a little digging I found plenty of criticism by families dealing with the problem and from behavioral specialists. One thing that did strike me while watching the episode "Booth Job" was when Max's mother Kristina started going to a support group for parents of children with Asperger's.

In health communication there is the idea of experiencing your symptoms and problems normally. Patients search for clues and reassurances that they have a normal, explainable problem and whatever the problem is, being a textbook example typically leads to more peace of mind than being an abnormal patient.

So when I was watching Parenthood and I noticed that as Kristina appeared to be identifying with other parents and experiencing a sense of relief at hearing other people with similar problems I realized that Support Groups function as this monitor or normalicy for social problems. It might seem like a duh, of course they do moment, but I think it would be interesting to research and write about. I'm sure it has been exhausted in the psychology end of research, and at least a fair amount in communication, but I wanted to save it here as a reference in case I need a paper idea for an upcoming class.

I hope to come up with more ideas, and hopefully more original and insightful ideas to post up here in the future, probably along with some personal posts as well!