[Patrick85]

My dad keeps criticizing everything I do and he gets me mad about moving out. He and my sister constantly berate me over everything I do. I am 26 and she is 34. She likes to criticize me whenever I buy anything. I want a PS4 and I am saving up for one from doing favors for my dad and she told me, "Well if you had a job you could afford one yourself! Why do you have to stick around mom and dad so much?" but I have looked for jobs and the only one I got was working at Burger King for 2 months before I quit because I got burnt out too easily and it was too emotionally exhausting for me. I do not believe that I should still be working minimum wage after college.

All I want to do is study brain science. That's it. I want to get a Master's Degree in psychology in the neuroscience field. After that, maybe I could get a Ph.D. but that is unrealistic because I am not that caliber of a scientist. I can't see myself doing a regular office job at all. I don't want to do an office job like working with computers. I don't want to utilize my people skills and my computer skills. I know too much about psychology from the biological side. I can see patterns in behavior especially with children. I understand how dopamine and ADHD are related which is why stimulant medication is the only proven treatment method for lowering the symptoms of ADHD. I know all about this kind of stuff. I even know the 1999 ADHD study that showed how treatment with stimulant medication compares to treatment with other methods. But I guess I am not good enough to get into graduate school even though I got a 3.2 overall GPA and I scored high on my major field test. I also scored high on most of the practice GRE tests and I bought the GRE prep books and studied those. But since I do not have the social skills to get 3 letters of recommendation then NOPE! CAN'T GO! TOO BAD! NOT ME! And I weigh 350 lbs because my dad fed me whatever I wanted when I was little because the autism made me scream and cry when I was not fed what I wanted. Now that is making my life more difficult because I can't seem to lose the weight even after signing up for a gym for 8 months and having 16 personal training sessions. This is bringing me down hard and nobody's reply or advice is going to be good enough because I am too smart for anyone's help and I know what I want and I only want this. I only want to be skinny and work in psychology. That is all. No other sort of job is going to satisfy me.

[manwithnofriends]

...calmed down? Good.

Now make sure your goals are realistic. Don't make them sound impossible. Make sure you know how to achieve your goals. Otherwise the pressure will cook inside you and make you explode again.

How's this for an idea: look back at the study you read about. Then find material from the later years that reference this study, and observe all the progression in this area of research. You might be able to progress it even further with your own research - that's what a PhD student does.

[Rapunzel]

I'm a licensed therapist with an autistic spectrum disorder. It was hard. I got rejected a lot. I gave up. I didn't get into the type of program that I wanted to. But here I am. I'm working in psychology. I was only diagnosed with Asperger's not quite two years ago, and I've been a fully licensed mental health counselor for just a little bit longer than that. When I originally applied for graduate school they told me that mu social skills were too strange and that I couldn't work with people. They said that I should get a second bachelor's degree in engineering. I gave up on everything for about 15 years and finally couldn't deal with life anymore and in coming out of a crisis and making my way back up out of the deep, dark pit, I realized that I needed to get back into school and develop a career. I found a way. I had to consider different paths than the one that I thought was the best, and that was hard, but it was what I needed to do. It doesn't happen all at once, but don't give up and don't rule anything out automatically.