Images Matter

The thing is… it’s so hard to NOT caricature the many faceted, and heavily emotional field of psychiatry. The truth is, our country is still terrified of psychiatry. With the advent of demographically specific pharmaceutical advertising, we have convinced an entire generation of people that they SHOULD be medicated (even if they don’t necessarily need it)… meanwhile, the people who truly suffer from “Persistent Mental Illness” have neither the desire nor inclination to access the treatment that they desperately need.

It should be diagnostic (sarcastically) that if you WANT to be treated, we should seriously LOOK at whether it is necessary.

The program “Mental” hits some of the points accurately: the new director strips his clothing to gain the trust of a naked and psychotic patient. Truthfully, this strategy could work, but one would never want to leave one’s self in the highly vulnerable state of nudity to de-escalate a patient.

What is “de-escalated” is the focus on how quickly the director takes control of the writing implement that the psychotic patient is using to scratch in the walls.

Working with acutely decompensated psychiatric patients is some of the most rewarding and risky work you could ever do. One doesn’t need to emphasize the danger. Nor does one need to emphasize that there might be a “zipper” in their head.

The truth is that unless you’ve been there, you don’t know the reality of the relationship.

However, the world can be shown, with concern for the patient, as long as you continue the integrity that is so important to care-providers.

Is that possible???

We’ll continue to watch “Mental” and comment.

Peace

So I must admit that I do have some of the burden to bear (at least in my own narcissistic mind). I had approached a few instructors when I first arrived at film school about the possibility of producing a series about the inpatient psychiatric field. I was continually told that “Now was probably the time” as it had not yet been seen. Although many, many hospital “procedurals” had been shown, the authentic psychiatric series had yet to come to fruition.

Well, I didn’t want to make my grad school experience about making that happen… to my shame. I see know that had I come to grad school with the psychiatric television series as my driving force… things may have been different… or would they.

First, I see the procedural TV series in the psychiatric vein needing to happen. As I mentioned, you can’t swing a dead ferret without bumping up against a procedural medical series where at last…Nurses are having their glories sung. Just this season, there are at least two series (Hancock …er… Hawthorne, and Nurse Jackie).

But where are the 5150’s ???

“Wonderland” (Direct TV’s 101) certainly made an honest attempt, and succeeded in many many ways. They seemed to make an honest attempt to portray the “front-lines” of an inpatient psychiatric unit: the variety of patients in the throes of their acute illnesses, the vulnerability of staff to unpredictable, acting out behaviors, and by far… the irony of care-givers being frequently as “not-normal” as their patients.

But ultimately it was a series about doctors, MD’s, the people who occupy the supreme position of power in the patient / care-giver quotient.

We’ve seen that already. When will we get a subjective look into what it is like to be subjected to an arguably imperfect, and sometimes abusive psychiatric system?

This season’s “Mental” (Fox TV, with a seriously ill-advised “zipper” in it’s advertised “Logo” head) has a shot at taking the topic into the serious grounds with which it needs, but there’s no reason to be optimistic if it’s trailer has any indication of it’s final worth.

We’ll catch you on the flip side of its Pilot.

Peace,

Cyber culture continues to perplex the s#*t out of me.

I remember as an undergraduate getting into my first “Flame Wars” with online participants from Usenet as part of a New Media class (obviously I wasn’t assigned to flame with others, but it just… you know… turned out that way). I kept struggling to figure out whether the uninhibited behavior online was a result of the anonymity that the internet affords, and whether the behavior was a reflection of our “truer” selves, or an exaggeration. The people with whom I flamed continually stood upon insults that adhered to what I call the “Unholy Trinity”. That is, forging every insult in terms that could be reduced to the following three words: bitch, fag, and nigger. When they called you out, you were either a racial, sexist, or homophobic slur.

Was this behavior a reflection of the ability to express their true sentiments without any serious consequences, or were they just throwing the extremes because the internet is basically a Holodeck where people (almost) never get hurt?

Or does it matter which is the case? Perhaps the real issue is that the behavior is here, it is continual, and we still don’t know what this type of behavior has in store for us.

Which brings us to the Scary Maze Game.

There is apparently an online prank-game (one of many) in which a participant tries to negotiate their way through a maze, only to be startled by a frightening, Exorcist-like face on screen, accompanied by sudden loud screams. I fell for a comparable like prank online, and it left me a few pounds lighter in the colon I can tell you.

But what’s even more horrifying, is the phenomenon of people actually RECORDING video of their small children falling for the prank and freaking POSTING the video to YouTube. One of the more saddening videos can be viewed here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_-U9PBiA8c

My heart breaks when I watch the look on this little girls face. So much so, that I posted a comment on the page, stating that I hoped her startle reflex becomes exaggerated and she kicks the parents in the genitals the next time they try to surprise her with a hug. I know…I don’t really hope her startle reflex becomes exaggerated.

But get this, I actually got a response comment asking me to basically lighten up. If you read the comments on the same page provided in the link, you’ll find it’s pretty evenly split between those that have similar feelings to mine, but with just as many people claiming how uptight the others are and that it’s just plain funny.

I really really hope that somehow digital culture enables us to “play hard”, rather than show our true selves. That the coldness and cruelty that I observe online is only a cyber-phenomenon. But somehow, I find it hard to believe that continually playing hard doesn’t translate into actually being hard, that continually expressing ourselves without consideration for either consequences or other’s feelings doesn’t terminate in an actual set of de facto values. Actions do speak louder than words… even when they’re just words.

Peace

Like it or not, we have markedly entered the age of the image. In this age, the image will be lingua franca, coin of the realm, pick your metaphor. Why this is of supreme importance to anyone online is that the image is the de facto “truth” regardless of what any futuristic time machine DVR with automatic focus will provide. You can scream bloody murder and hold your seventh press conference if you and your publicist can afford it, but it may better serve you to “grok” the above mentioned fact… the image, and concomitantly, its coverage, will be held as the bottom-line.

Why is this “grokking” so important?

Well, for one, you don’t have to let Keith Olberman break your heart.

I had really fell in love with Keith Olberman during the Bush II Dynastic realm, if only to be able to witness someone put that spawn of Asmodeus, Bill O’ Reilly, in his place. But beyond that, his writers and researchers appear to be top-shelf, his delivery is very clever, and he was a welcome respite from what had become an Orwellian nightmare for me.

But that ended today.

MSNBC has shown that they are just as biased as those fascist-tinged mannequins at the FOX propaganda channel.

To my broken-hearted shame.

I watched Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi jerk, stutter, and obfuscate her way through the question of “If you were lied to then…” (as late as Feb 03) “… why did you tell us as recent as last month…” (Apr of 09) “…that you had not been lied to?” (this question coming from CNN’s Dana Bash)

I don’t care what anyone says… my gut tells me Pelosi was lying to Bash.

Now I understand that this doesn’t take away from the Bush administration’s culpability in the entire “torture” story.

BUTTTTTT…

It does show IMHO that EVERYONE was complicit in those early days after 9/11 when we were apparently willing to excuse anything to get that JACK BAUER edge on our perceived opponents. It seems that the DEMS are scurrying to the (Non-Complicit) torture holes, while the REPS are forgetting that they implicitly ENCOURAGED torture while stating that those of us who disagreed were TRAITORS.

Back to “grokking”

Keith Olberman, my now, somewhat less than perfect hero, is willing to forego the footage of Pelosi stuttering and side-stepping her way through questions, for an edit that shows a very brisk DENIAL from Pelosi.

And we come back to the “image”…

You can force, manipulate, comment, and “Head-Talk” an issue to death if you like…

But for those of us who are addicted to the latest and “freshest” “image”…

John Ford can blow us… you’re all had.

Peace be to all of you,
atheisticmystic