PB2A: Exploring Your Existing Interests and Locating Scholarly Journal Articles

I am majoring in Secondary English Education, but I have always had an interest in Psychology and learning more about what someone has todo to become a Psychologist. I have always been really intrigued by the way a Psychologist views the mind and how they have the capability to understand and help many different types of problems that people are dealing with. A Penn State Abington researcher that I found interest in is Laura Orrico. As I was reading about her interests and research, I found out that she is very in to the concept of studying the way people develop stability under conditions of uncertainty and change. As I kept reading, she also mentioned that over the past four years of ethnographic fieldwork she has studied topics such as: Trust development, knowledge production, community building and how people intersect with daily experiences, homelessness, racial diversity, community policing, and drug and alcohol dependency( mailto:%20laura.orrico@psu.edu ). She strictly focuses on how peoples mind, in different situations, react to what is happening. She also deals with issues that commonly are happening in todays world, and study's how people react to those things.
The topic that she is involved in, that I would love to study, is drug and alcohol dependency. It really interests me that Psychologists have a way of understanding and helping the mind, when it is under the influence of drugs or alcohol, that most people cannot wrap their head around. Drugs have a way of altering the mind completely nd even decreasing some of the things parts in your brain are suppose to do, so I find it so interesting that their are people out there that can talk to those people and actually understand what may be happening to their mind in that moment.The epidemic with drugs nowadays is insane, and I don't think people take much time to really read into it or help the addicts. I know a psychologists that has opened a recovery home for addicts of all age to go to and by seeing the amazing impact that she has contributed, it automatically made me want to help also. Even recently, there has been a drug bust for 5M in Kensington and they also have been opening up safe injection faculties. So with all these different things happening in this field that I want to study, I would love to know Laura's opinion on these things and hear what information she can provide about these topics.