Concerning Journal Examples

… Day after day, I somehow wake up more tired than the day before. The air resists me like a syrup, and yet I can only stare at the ceiling while yearning for sleep to come over me. …

Reasoning: The reference to tiredness may represent insomnia, psychomotor retardation, and restlessness. These labels can be ‘checked’ for this journal.

… By my third year in Newton, I had lost all hope of feeling normal again. Every memory of my mother was now stained with her death …

Reasoning: While these feelings are focused on past events, they are coded for the purposes of this exercise as they may continue through the present. We should check ‘Intrusive memory of past trauma’, ‘Recurrent thoughts of death’, and ‘Hopelessness’. ALJI’s final prototype can confirm if an author still has these thoughts and feelings.

… I joked about my traumatic stay at a foster home filled with verbal abuse when I was nine. But they only stared back instead of laughing. So I quickly told them how I had mostly forgotten about it (a lie). …

Reasoning: While the events happened in the past, it is unclear if the author’s feelings are resolved about this today. ‘Stressful traumatic event’ and ‘Intrusive memory of past trauma’ would be good labels to select. Since there is an incongruence between trauma (verbal abuse) and affect (joking), an additional code could be added to specify this (e.g. ‘Incongruent mood and behavior’)

Safe Journal Examples

… I became used to my little brother’s panicked yells in the night. Each time I thought that the night terrors would make him think twice about watching another scary movie, but he would always ask to rent another one. …

Reasoning: Since it is the brother instead of the author experiencing the night terrors, there are no labels to check based off of these sentences. It would be checked if these behaviors were upsetting the author.