Showing posts with label psychiatry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label psychiatry. Show all posts

Thursday, 31 August 2023

When madness is accepted as norm!

Shutter Island (2010)
Director: Martin Scorsese



Back when India was a newly independent nation, its Prime Minister, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, was officiating the opening of a psychiatric hospital in New Delhi. As part of his visit, he did a walkabout. All its inmates were excited to have a PM visiting them. All of them were standing smiling, waiting for Nehru to speak with them, except one. He was sitting in a corner, looking away, staring into space. Nehru approached him. 


"Hello, how are you?" told Nehru. "I am the Prime Minister of India. How do you find this hospital?" The man slowly turned around, lifted his head to look at the Premier, and replied, "Yeah, that is what I thought when I first arrived, too. Don't worry, they will give you medicine, and you will be alright!"


That is how it is. There is a thin line between reality and insanity, which is detachment from reality. It is all about perspective. Imagine telling the world that someone is watching you all the time, and you will be labelled as having paranoid schizophrenia in the 1980s. Now, it is legitimate to have closed-circuit TV all over the place to monitor citizens for the public's safety. Remember when the Soviet Union and the USA had such high numbers of schizophrenics. The peculiar thing about their condition is that a Soviet schizophrenic will be labelled normal in the US and vice versa. 


We are well aware of the concept of gaslighting and Munchausen Syndrome by proxy. Popularised by Ingrid Bergman's 1944 film 'Gaslight', a husband tinkers with the home fittings and events around the wife to convince her that she is turning mad. Munchausen Syndrome, by proxy, is another favourite theme of Hollywood. Here, the parent or the caregiver, usually with advanced medical knowledge, will wilfully keep their subject either by exaggerating symptoms or by poisoning their ward themselves to give themselves (the caregivers) a sense of importance. 


It seems that it is easy to suggest mental illness. If one does not conform to the perceived acceptable mode of conduct, he is deemed a deviant. He is ignorant if he does not subscribe to one way of thinking. If a specific ritual is not followed, he is unstable. A label would be put upon him by the rest. 

There will come a time, as is already happening now, when bizarre behaviours that used to be frowned upon are considered normal. Many of these acts go under the cloak of self-expression and privacy setting. One is not supposed to bat an eyelid when a hirsute, phenotypically male person with a full moustache and beard decides to don a body-hugging dress and put on a 6-inch stiletto, strutting his posterior to an unamused crowd.


This film is an interesting one where the viewers are left to guess what is real and which are imagined. What is right and what is wrong? Between good and evil. Two US Marshalls are sent to investigate the missing case of an inmate of a hospital for the criminally insane. As the Marshalls get deep into their case, they realise that many things do not match.


Sunday, 27 August 2023

Identity has many meanings!

Split(2017)
Director: M. Night Shyamalan

Identity means different things to different people. For some, it is all about religion. No matter which part of the world they practise their religious rituals, it remains uniform. They wear their similar-looking tunic on their sleeves as their badge of honour. 

On the other spectrum, a new generation of society swears by the gender they identify with. It is immaterial to them the chromosomal makeup they carry and how they look phenotypically. In fact, they also believe that gender is so fluid that they may decide to don the gender they feel at the drop of a hat or the side of the bed they get up from. 


Identity sometimes overlaps, too. People who identify themselves as great outdoors enthusiast may also click with bibliophiles. A person in one group may be a member of another. Businesses have long known this, and they sell their products under the guise of lifestyle choices, e.g. targeted mechanise to meet their so-called lifestyle. Politicians use the identity of race, religion and siege mentality to rally voters to their side. Statesmen use sports and flags to stand under the identity of a nation to push its citizens to greater heights. They identify the 'others' who do not share these sentiments as the enemies of the State.


Ancient wisdom needs to appreciate the concept of State-Nation. There is a Man and his relationship within his community. His identity morphs in tandem with the change in his responsibility within his community. A newborn is ushered into the fold with rituals. Once a child reaches puberty, an initiation ceremony, be it a celebration to promote her marriageable status after her menarche or tattooing of boys to honour their entry into manhood. Then, the marriage, the delivery, the funerals and so forth. 


A person's identity changes within his or her lifespan. Even at any time, he has to don different identities: a son, a brother, a friend, a student, a husband, a father and so on. Sometimes, he has to take multiple identities to play his role. His demeanour may alter as and how the role demands him to be. His base is the same, but he has to wear different hats.


The occurrence of multiple identities, even in psychiatrists' experience, is rare. This is different from the ebbs and waning moods that all of us are prone to. We are talking about a total change in personality, mannerisms, accents and demeanour. Of course, for the sake of telling stories, authors push their creative licence to the limit. 


In 2005, Kollywood came forth with 'Anniyan', a nerdy do-gooder Ramanujam transforms into Remo, a vigilante alter-ego who tries to correct the wrong things that Ramanujan is too meek to do.


As part of a trilogy between 'Unbreakable' and 'Glass', M. Night Shyamalan's 'Split' tells about a seriously mentally disturbed with 32 personalities. He suffers from DID (Disassociative Identity Disorder) and has a penchant for kidnapping teenage girls.


At the end of the day, people with vested interests use identity politics to create mayhem everywhere. Instead of coming together as one human race and aiming for utopia, the anarchists and communists, and even neocons, want to press the red reset button at the earliest time possible. For the anarchist, destruction is the seed for a new beginning. For the Commies, armed struggle is the way to change. The Neo-Cons care a damn. Since they have accepted God, for all practical reasons, they are ready for Armageddon. At the End of the Days, they know they have a reserved place in the Lord's bosom in His Kingdom. The Mozzies use identity politics as a victim card for more concession and no contribution.


Thursday, 10 February 2022

The problems of growing up!


Reprise (2006)
Director: Joachim Trier

That is the problem dealing with mental illness, the unpredictability. This is worse when the affected party is young. If dealing with changing hormones and altered body image is hard enough, imagine how much more it would be to pave a life and steer himself away from all negativities of youth!

This must be more challenging when society defines a person as an adult at 18 and pressures the person to chase his future, paving the path for self-development, finding his own identity and fulfilling the desires of youth. It is no easy feat.

This 2006 film is part of the Oslo trilogy by director Joachim Trier. It primarily deals with two childhood friends who develop a passion for writing. They take a shot at writing and both handle their paths differently. With them are their three other friends who play an important role in their life.

An interesting movie that would strike a chord with those who had grown up with a younger person with pressures of the mind.

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Tuesday, 25 January 2022

Nature or nurture?

What The Peeper Saw @ Night Hair Child (Diabolica Malicia, 1972)
Directors: James Kelley & Andrea Bianchi

This is what one calls a 2am movie. One which one watches in the still of the early morning when he has insomnia and the rest of the home occupants are snoring away. It starts off sounding like a 70s B-grade soft porn flick with the exotic location, the flaring bell-bottoms and Mediterranean weather. Then there is the intimacy between a teenage son and his stepmother, who is barely a decade older. A murder is thrown in, and then an attempted murder...

When it comes to young kids acting way out of their leagues, we often say that they are merely reacting to the external stimuli that they are exposed to. We look at their parents' (or lack thereof) parenting skills. We try to place the blame squarely on either parent for what they did or did not - for being absent at school functions or failing to offer a shoulder to cry on when the situation had warranted. 


Britt Ekland
Nobody blames the company or the friends they decide to keep. Oh, yes! They blame it on the parents, too, as if parents can hawk on their choice of friends. And the list of virtual (it used to be invisible) friends is too tricky to keep track of. Nobody talks about the unrestricted ease of access to smut available to them. And with so much pressure there for children to grow up fast, nothing is easy. 

Every child is assumed to be born as pristine as a white piece of cloth, and his caregiver apparently paints the patterns and hues on them. Really? Are all children the end product of their parent's upbringing? We know there is no 'one-way-fit-all' system to work for all. There surely must be children who, by biology, are innately evil. Science has shown that human beings are conditioned to 'behave' in a particular fashion with social conditioning anyway. Left to their own devices, people would just act to fulfil their primal desires.

Marcus Lester

This 1972 production created a lot of controversies when it was released with its quite liberal exhibition of the female body and even an implied underage sex scene. It is the story of a twelve-year-old boy whose mother died in a bathtub. His father brings home a new girlfriend. She finds this angelic boy a little too precarious and acting weird. As the movie progresses, we realise that the pubescent boy has some unsettling behaviours like peeping on courting couples, killing cats just for the kick of it and even peeping and even murdering his biological mother!



Saturday, 6 March 2021

The problem of information overload!

Crime Scene: The Vanishing at Cecil Hotel (S1 E1-4; 2021)
Netflix Docu-series.

This case shows how information in the wrong hands can create a lot of unnecessary tension and can sometimes be potentially dangerous. With the ease of access to an ocean of information literally at their fingertips, everyone goes around with a halo thinking that they are better than the professionals who spent half their lifetime learning and doing the things they are trained to do.

In 2013, a 22-year-old Canadian girl, Elisa Lam, goes missing in Los Angeles (LA), where she went for a short holiday all by herself. The police were alerted when the girl failed to call home daily as promised. Three days into the investigation but the police were at a dead end. They knew she stayed in Cecil Hotel, and the hotel had a CCTV recording of her acting bizarrely as she was entering a lift. Even the sniffer dog could not locate her. All investigations revealed was that she had a personal blog on Tumblr, where she poured all her inner feeling. Her parents and sister revealed that Elisa suffered from bipolar disease.

At this stage, the police decided to release the CCTV footage to the public to obtain more about the missing person. That started an avalanche of input from internet sleuths from the world over. Many self-appointed armchair investigators and You-tubers spent many many man-hours scrutinising and dissecting the recording with a fine toothcomb coming up with many theories; some were quite outrageous. A group of them accused the hotel staff of tampering with the CCTV tape as the video flow was not smooth and the time recordings were smudged. There was the insinuation of the hotel covering up for its personnel, and police corruption was mentioned. At the time of Elisa Lam's disappearance, there was a tuberculosis outbreak among the homeless community in Skid Row in LA, where Cecil Hotel was located. Healthcare workers were doing random testing on potential victims using a kit named LAM-ELISA. This sparked a conspiracy theory that somewhat Elisa Lam was a biological weapon in a secret governmental project!


Cecil Hotel had indeed seen better times. Built during the heady times of the swinging 20s, it fell into hard times after the Great Depression and never really recovered. It drew in seedy characters and was the venue for murders, drugs, prostitution and many more. It housed vagabonds and serial killers. Against this background, that part of LA, known as Skid Row, became the USA's poorest part, probably the world. Because of its location and local housing rules, Cecil Hotel developed part of the building to house in the society's disadvantaged segment. It was the same building but with clear demarcations except for the elevators. Hence, there is a certain level of interaction of the hotel guests with the hapless long-staying renters.

Another idea floated around was that Elisa was on recreational drugs, hence, the abnormal gestures seen in the lift footage.

About 19 days after her disappearance, hotel guests complained of plumbing issues. The janitor who inspected the water tanks found Elisa's body in one of four water tanks, naked and decomposed. The police, in their press statement, in narrating the find, described how the janitor had to open the hatch to discover Elisa. (It was later corrected).

The coroners' report classified the cause of death as indeterminate awaiting toxicological findings. As the authorities dragged on with the final report, the internet sleuths became more restless. There was a lot of yoyoing between suicide and homicide. It was Youtubers from the four corners of the world who wanted to have their say. The whole scenario mirrored that of the Korean paranormal blockbuster 'Dark Water'.

Around that time, a Death Punk artiste named Morbid (aka Pablo Vergara) stayed at the hotel. As his song describes death and murders, some eerily similar to Lam's death, the social media vilified him as the possible murderer. He took it so badly that he developed suicidal thoughts and had to be institutionalised.

Elisa Lam
The coroner's office finally issued the cause of death as accidental drowning with bipolar disorder as a precipitating factor. Her psychiatric drugs levels were almost non-existent, indicating that she had not been compliant with her treatment. Elisa had had another similar a couple of years previously.

This unfortunate case shows how a simple, straight-forward tragedy with a simple explanation ends up with various other equally compelling arguments. There is no such thing as beyond reasonable doubt. The element of suspicion can be conjectured by creative minds to escape conviction. There must have been so many wrongful convictions based on compelling circumstantial evidence aided by our tunnel visions and laissez-faire attitude of people commissioned to perform specific tasks. It must be the cruel twist of fate that made the innocent pay time for crimes they did not commit. Some call it the misalignment of his stars; others call it paying dues of past karma.

Sometimes unrelated events change the course of the trial and subsequent fate of the accused. I think the shut hatch of the water tank can be explained like this. I guess the opened hatch must have been noticed by the hotel workers who frequently hung out at the roof. They must have inspected the tank and did not find anything as Elisa could have had submerged. He must have shut it thinking that it was an oversight by the plumber. How one action can change the narrative?

Wednesday, 2 December 2020

Opium for the masses

Trance (Malayalam, 2020)

A sucker is born every minute, they say. Probably what they meant was that the rooting reflex was innate in all babies. Stroke the cheek and the baby would automatically turn its head towards the stimulus and initiate a suckling reaction. It also could imply to the many who are suckered up to racketeering and daylight robberies. 

Watching this movie was a sort of a deja vu experience for me. A close relative had discovered Jesus late in life, and she made it her raison d'être to spread His word. And along she went to all four corners of the country praying for the sick and the fallen. She would personally harbour drug addicts and vagabonds in her home to nurse them back to functionality.

I remember her style. To get her congregation interested in her sermon, out of the blue, she would blurt out 'Hallelujah' on top of her lungs to get approval what she was saying. And an often repeated phrase was that Jesus spoke to her in her dreams. How she would in her usual demonstrative form place her hand on the vertex of her client to pray desperately to chase off the devil that plagued them. She looked sincere and was utterly convinced that she was doing something good. At least it kept her sane.

Well, that is not what this film is trying to highlight. There are people out there who target people's weakness and make a living out cheating desperate people blind. Man created religion to give them a tuft of hope in facing day to day uncertainties of life. Religion is supposed to give them sanity when the storm on Earth becomes too overwhelming. It gives them the assurance that their actions of maintaining peace and order will be rewarded, in this life or after. It absorbs the guilt of the mistakes that he commits at the moment of inebriation. There is a fine line between faith giving peace of mind and it being the cause of lunacy. Extremism negates other points of views. There is a loss of mindfulness and the compulsion to cut off other people beliefs. The guilt of not sticking to the true tenets of religion can turn one into a raving lunatic.

It is beyond comprehension how some people are often lulled into submission by putting the fear of God. The world becomes too complicated for some to strive a living that they get suckered into the promise of divinity in negating all the miseries. And they fall prey to their myths. Rather than resorting to critical thinking, they are deluded with blind faith.

This Malayalam movie tells a tale, perhaps not unreal, of a motivational speaker, mired with a sad family history filled with mental illness and a recent suicide of his brother. He is pulled in by a group of businessmen who use religion to dupe the unsuspecting public into evangelical Christianity and faith healing. Viju Prasad is picked up by a talent corp to be given an intensive course on the Bible and is soon christened Pastor Joshua Carlton (JC, referring to Jesus Christ, of course). JC starts doing 'staged' healing that he himself begins to think that he may indeed have healing powers. His bosses are hot under the collar as JC behaves as if he is the brain behind the whole facade.

This film may be the anthesis of 'Mookuthi Amman'. If Mookuthi Amman pokes fun at Hindu godmen, 'Trance' hits up at the bogus media-savvy megalomaniac pastors who victimise desperate patients who are wit's end to find a cure for their advanced maladies. Fahadh Faasil gives a sterling performance as a doting elder brother and a confused healer who is himself at the brink of a mental breakdown. 

Sunday, 20 October 2019

It's cold out there!

Joker (2019)

It was a time when I was a teenager. I had been selected to play the role of Jesus Christ in a pantomime. It was an Easter play depicting the Resurrection. Obviously, the most alluring girl in the Sunday class, Catherine, was cast as Mary Magdelene. Everything went on all, and the show was enjoyed by everyone.

I realised the hard way that people are generally not nice, and children are imps. Life is not fair. There is no justice on Earth, and we are kidding ourselves that there is a higher judge out there who would mete out appropriate justice when the time is ripe. As if pacifying a wailing child, we convince ourselves, rather foolishly that payback may happen in the afterlife or next birth.

After the show, the children started teasing me as 'Black Jesus'. Of course, I did not know then that Jesus may have had Negroid features, but I felt particularly offended with the word 'black'. The teasing went on, joined by the other. One particular chap, Jeremy, I think his name was, was particularly aggressive in provoking a reaction. I chased him. When I could not catch with him, I removed my shoe and threw at him. By a twist of fate, it hit him painfully on his back to invoke a counter-reaction. Just about then, the Sunday School Master walked in, only to witness Jeremy getting the shoe treatment.

So began the talk session and after listening out both sides of the story (to be fair), the Master told both Jeremy and me to apologise to each other with a handshake.

I felt that I had been wronged. I had been told to say something that was not my fault at all. There I was minding my own business doing what a good student should do, and there comes somebody to provoke anger, and when I retaliate, I have to apologise. It appeared unfair, but that seems to be the goings of the world. When someone jumps a red light at an intersection to hit you when you are free to go, the fault of the offender is only 80%. The onus also falls on you to ensure that the road is free of traffic before you move. So say, my lawyer friends.
I have many received many WhatsApp messages depicting
him as a Joker. His mannerisms, accent and subject matter 
may not make sense to many but beneath all that is wisdom
that is screaming to be deciphered. Nithyananda of 'the me 
in you' fame. ©Nithyananda.org.

Nature is also not kind. Try spending a night outside in the cold. If you do not die of hypothermia, probably a wild beast will kill you. Play football in the torrential rain, if you do not slip and fall, maybe you would be struck by lightning. Living carelessly in the wild may expose you to zoonotic diseases, parasites in the soil, in arthropods and even the plants and water which are said to be the elixirs of life. They are all just out to get you. What does not kill you only makes you stronger. Life is just not fair. Life is not a bed of roses. It is not a reward.

I started having a soft spot for the cartoon character 'The Joker', especially so after watching Heath Ledger in 'Dark Knight' and his sad ending. This movie just cemented my liking. It highlights the plight of the little men in this world.

We all want to do our things in this world; indulge in niceties, do our things with our loved ones and hopefully, pave a unique path for them to tread. We think that by obeying the rules and setting our life path along the lines set by those who have been, we will be okay. We are deluded into thinking hard work and obedience equal success and happiness. Sadly, this is far from the truth.

There is a constant plot to swindle the masses by those in power to cow them into submission. The poor are their target whenever their economic pursuit hits a brick wall. Again the oppressed gets the blame and the brunt of sufferings when hardship hits a community.

'Joker' shows such a scenario. The divide between the haves and have nots have spread so extensive that the crushed are fighting back. Jokers are the scorns of the system who periodically rise to kick the society in the behind to jolt it to reality. 

They are essentially revolutionaries who make their political statements through noticeable means. Jokers cringe in the inside to make others laugh. At one time, people thought Jesus of Nazareth was a joker - asking his followers to turn the other cheek when struck! 

A good show 4.8/5.




Wednesday, 9 January 2019

The curse of memory?

Thirst (Törst, a.k.a Three Strange Loves, Swedish; 1949)
Director: Ingmar Bergman.

Do you really know what we want in our lives?  Are we dreaming up something and spending our whole lives trapped in a nightmare attempting to achieve the impossible? When mores in the society used to be so strict, perhaps it gave a certain amount of sanity to the general population. With empowerment and the decline in needing to conform, people started doing things as their wish. Happiness and self-contentment is the end-point. The problem is that the quenching of this thirst is an ever-elusive unattainable goal. 

The film, which is quite revolutionary at this time, in its cinematography and storyline is typical of Bergman's movies. It speaks of things that are considered taboo in the society at that time- suicide, infidelity, lesbianism and depression. It revolves around three love stories which are somewhat inter-related. It is narrated from the point of view of Rut, who is returning from her Italian vacation with her thrifty husband, Bertil, who counts every penny that they spent together. Their relationship is not really fantastic with constant bickering. Rut is frequently moody and nags most of the time. During their long train journey return home, the unhappy Rut reflects on the things that she has had. She used to be an up-and-coming ballet dancer who had an affair with an abusive married man. He scooted off at the first news of her pregnancy. After undergoing a complicated termination of pregnancy which doomed her to infertility, she yearns to be a mother. Bertil had a baggage of his own. He had previously married a widow, Viola, who nowhere really got over her deceased husband and needed therapy.


In another flashback, we see Viola being treated by a psychiatrist who could easily be labelled as a whacko himself. She runs away from the therapist's office only to meet a former schoolmate, Valborg. Now Valborg used to be Rut's confidantè in her ballet school when they were terrorised by a fierce instructor. 


The unstable Viola was overwhelmed by Valborg's unabashed romantic confrontations. It proved too much for her that Viola committed suicide by jumping off a pier.

Meanwhile, Rut-Bertil's shaky marriage gets more bizarre. Unable to stand the wife, Bertil actually has thoughts of throwing her off the moving train and at another instance, whacking her at the back of the head with the end of a beer bottle. 


It ends with a happy note with both parties secretly promising to work harder at making the marriage work.


Maybe our ability to remember things is a curse. Despite the leaps of progress we have made with our increase in our cognitive function over the aeons, in the emotional field,  our inability to forget our bitter experience impedes our desire to put our past behind and move on. Our daunting histories keep bringing up trapped like a rat whose feet are stuck in sticky glue. The more it tries to entangle itself, a bigger mess it creates for itself.


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