Diagnosing and Treating the Ophelia Syndrome

1. Treatment Number Two: Dare to know and Trust Yourself.

1.1. Spend time learning how to recognize your original thoughts and what your thinking looks like and consists of

1.2. This can be down through journaling.

2. Treatment Number Three: Learn to Live with Uncertainty

2.1. Accept the fact that there will not always be one answer, and that sometimes there will not even be an answer.

2.2. Make sure you seek out information for yourself, don't always just blindly follow or believe what the "experts" say.

3. Treatment Number Four: Practice Dialectical Thinking

3.1. Practice thinking through both sides of the argument, even when they are opposing

3.2. This can be down through writing a revision that takes the other position

4. Treatment Number Five: Foster Idle Thinking

4.1. Sometimes we have to take time and opportunities to do seemingly unrelated activities such as bath or bike and avoid thinking to allow free thoughts or epiphanies to come into our minds.

5. Definition: A dependence on someone else to do all your thinking and tell you what you should think about and what sort of thinking to do and what answers you need to find

5.1. Consists of an "Ophelia" the intellectual baby that needs to be told what to do constantly

5.2. Consists of a "Polonius" who enables the Ophelia and provides them with all of the answers.

6. Treatment Number One: Seek Out and Learn from Great Teachers, Regardless of What they teach.

6.1. Figure out who good teachers are, the ones who actually encourage original and often difficult critical thinking. They dont just make you a copy of themselves.

6.2. Take their classes even if they may not necessarily be in your major.

7. Treatment Number Six: Step Out of Bounds

7.1. In order to break free from the Ophelia Syndrome somtimes we have to step out and do things that may seem unconventional or make us uncomfortable.

7.2. We have to be willing to take risks and be wrong or make mistakes in order to experience real growth