Het Palrecha

When I first realised the gap between textbook psychology and real-world psychology, I felt extremely confused. For a while, I even questioned whether I would ever be able to make it as a therapist. The theories I had learned suddenly felt distant from what I was witnessing in real situations. It made me doubt whether I truly understood the field I had chosen. But over time, things slowly started to change.

As soon as I started getting real-world exposure through internships and working with professionals in the field, that belief was shaken. I had never imagined the gap between textbook psychology and real-world psychology would be so big. Psychology suddenly started feeling like a foreign language I was still trying to learn. Suddenly, people behaved like real people and not like case studies. I kept asking myself: how could a subject that felt so easy to understand in books become so difficult?

You open your phone just to check one notification. A headline grabs your attention, then another, and before you realise it, several minutes have passed. Your mood feels a little heavier, your thoughts more crowded, yet your thumb keeps scrolling. This everyday experience has a name: doomscrolling . It describes the habit of endlessly consuming negative or distressing news online, even when it leaves us feeling mentally exhausted. While doomscrolling is often talked about as an emotional...