At 9:45 this morning Angela from the AAD phoned me about my medical and spoke two words that completely changed my day: psych exam.

Let me tell you about my experiences with psychologists. I've had three psychologist-administered tests in the past: two IQ tests and the Myers-Briggs personality profile*. The former consisted of shuffling around little yellow triangles and answering interesting questions (when I was very young) and later (when I was older) turned into a pastiche of general knowledge, problem-solving and quirky memory puzzles like repeating a list of twenty numerals backwards. The Myers-Briggs questions, which we all took in high school to help us choose our career path, were much more interesting: they were fun in the same way that any pulpy personality-quiz is fun, but without the glaringly obvious 'right' and 'wrong' answers. You would answer a few hundred multiple-choice questions like "Which do you prefer, a circle or a square?" and at the end, after your answers had all been analysed, it would not only tell you what job you should be doing but whether you prefer chess or draughts.

It was the Myers-Briggs test that left me with two indelible impressions of psychologists: firstly, that they are not to be trusted; and secondly, that they deserve a kind of fascinated respect for being so sneakily clever. For example, how do they know that what I see in a circle is the same as what they see in a circle? In the end it's just dream-interpretation with a solid background in statistical analysis and some clever thinking. For sure, when I got back my personality report and it was right on the mark (it told me I would be good at science, I'm very curious, I prefer small groups of friends, I like backpacking and hiking, and I can blab on for hours on an idea that really interests me) then it seemed really smart and cool and magical - until I realised that the only reason I was sure it was 'right' was because I knew all along, anyway, that I liked science and hiking and so on and so forth. So they could have shortened the quiz by a few hundred questions and just asked, "Do you like science? Do you like ranting about completely irrelevant things? etc, and I would have got the same amount of insight into my character**. Also, looking back over it now, I notice that I selectively ignored a few things in the Myer-Briggs report that were way off the mark, like that I might be interested in law or economics, and that I wouldn't be the sort of person to like sport. In other words, it was convincing in the same way a palm-reader is convincing: it feeds off the hints you give it and spits back at you a reasonably accurate picture, and your credulity fills in the gaps that remain.

Anyway.

The reason Angela phoned me this morning was to let me know I'd have to drive down to Sydney in a week or so to do a pre-expedition psych exam. Rumour has it it's a 500-question test developed by the British Army. With that in the back of my mind, I got psychologist-induced self-second-guessing downward-spiral syndrome for the whole rest of today. It went something like this: I'm getting a little worried about the amount of work I have to do in the next two months. Hm. What's the bet there'll be a question in the psych test asking, "Do you ever get worried about not being able to do your work satisfactorily?" Hmm. If I tick 'yes' they'll think I'm a risky case because I might get down there and not be able to do my work. But if I tick 'no' they'll say, "She's obviously lying because no-one is ever totally confident about their work; she fell into the trap of our trick question and now we've exposed her as being both an incompetent worker AND a liar!"

You cannot win with psychologists. Don't listen to them, either, when they say, "Ah, but it's your own brain that's tangling you up, not we psychologists". A simple experiment will prove them wrong: psychologist in the room, brain goes in spirals; psychologist out of the room, brain OK.

Of course I do realise that this British Army psych test is a good idea because it will screen out anyone who's gonna go crazy down there with cabin fever or kitchen knives. Either that or it'll screen out anyone who doesn't belong in the British Army.

I'm going to bed.

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*So you can see I am sooo qualified to comment on psychology in general.

**Any psychologists or psychology students who wish to write in and correct the obvious flaws in my argument here can do so, but I know you won't because that's the kind of secretive, sneaky people you are***.

***Any psychologists who would like to retaliate by stereotyping scientists as evil, empathy-less nerds who create nuclear bombs - send your letters to nerdling.zine@gmail.com and I'll post them on this page to even the balance up a bit. Or else I'll just throw them out coz that's the kind of cold-hearted scientist I am.