Horgan Seminar Blog

  Mary Casey Professor Horgan HST 401 12 March 2026 Friend, Foe, or Therapist? I open my eyes to pitch black. I roll over and squint at my phone. 2:38 am. It's early Thursday morning, and I struggle to fall back asleep as the late night thoughts start pooling in. I’ve already journaled today in my notebook, where else can I turn?  I unlock my phone and find ChatGPT, scrolling through the chats we shared earlier in the day. I had asked for help studying for that biophysical chemistry quiz coming up. We had also chatted about how to debug my research capstone code. But that’s not what I want right now. I scroll down to find the chat I usually go to for support: making sense of my love life.  Moments like this illustrate how AI has quietly integrated itself into many parts of my life. What began as a simple academic tool has evolved into something much more complicated. I use AI regularly to summarize assigned articles, explain lecture slides, and help construct study ...

  Clayton Yun Professor Horgan HST 401 25 February 2026 From Magic Mushrooms to Mental Remedy:  How Psychedelics are Changing the Way We View Mental Health When I first took psychedelics, it wasn’t for therapy. It was about curiosity, from the visual distortions to the introspective nature that psychedelics bring; I was intrigued. I had heard many stories from people who became enlightened and changed their lives, to those who went crazy, to say the least. After getting over the 30 or so minutes that followed eating the mushrooms, with their weird aftertaste and anticipation, I started to relax and embraced the feelings. Patterns on the walls started appearing, and my worries and self-deprecating thoughts turned into giggles and constructive criticism. I was seeing my problems at a new angle, which is exactly why psychedelic therapy is seemingly on the rise again. Psychedelics have been around for a very long time; they were used in Ceromonial ways by indigenous people all...

  I've Got it All: New Age Hypochondria and the Rise of Social Media Mediated Self-Diagnosis I pledge my honor that I have abided by the Stevens Honors System. It's quite easy to fall down the rabbit hole. You start unassuming, scrolling on your phone through Instagram or TikTok, and you come across posts sharing what it feels like to be overwhelmed at a party, or nervous when entering a new space. This all means you might have anxiety… and if you have anxiety, then maybe you're feeling anxious right now? You scroll a bit more to calm down, and you see other posts about being disorganized and messy. “Do you forget where you place your phone and lose track of time quickly? Those are missed traits of ADHD.” All of a sudden, you have to worry about that as well.  It doesn’t end there; more and more posts will populate your feed as you scroll, each sharing the minute details you might have missed that indicate you have a mental illness that has gone undetected earlier in your l...

  Sydney Bell  February 26  HST 401  I am going to be honest. I haven’t put much of any thought into my mental health throughout my life. Maybe it’s how I was raised, maybe I’m just less prone to mental illness due to genetics, I really don’t know. Likewise, my family and friends haven’t been through any major mental health issues/illnesses(but even if they were I wouldn’t be prone to just publishing it online without having a lengthy conversation with them first, out of respect). But now that I’m thinking about it, maybe there are certain aspects of life that make you more or less prone to having a mental illness, and maybe if these aspects were more understood more progress could be made in terms of treating mental health.    Elyn Saks, a law professor and psychoanalyst, recounts her personal life experience in an interview with science journalist, John Horgan. In this interview she discusses how life feels as a person who deals with schizophreni...

 Jack Caputo 26 Feb 2026 HST401 I pledge my Honor that I have abided by the Stevens Honor System Don’t Get Schizophrenia in the US I recognize that I am truly fortunate to not have any sort of psycho-condition, nor have anyone close to me who has one. With the prevalence of schizophrenia being between 0.25-0.64% [1], this is not the case for a considerable amount of Americans, around 850 thousand to 2.2 million. And because of the nature of schizophrenia, the condition affects not only the diagnosed but also their family, friends, potential coworkers – really everyone in their life.   Reading the account of Prof. Elyn Saks [2], a successful academic and author with a PhD in psychoanalysis who also happens to have schizophrenia, exposed me to how the condition actually manifests in a person's life. I had the conception that schizophrenia was all about being out of touch with reality, seeing people and hearing voices, unable to distinguish what was real and fabricated. There was...