Article in The Guardian as popular as Crocodile Dundee's snake in a lucky dip ?

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10 August

To my mind, such of the mental-health community as has been lashing out at Giles Fraser's article Taking pills for unhappiness reinforces the idea that being sad is not human has missed the point :


Typical comment on Twitter says that Fraser does not know what depression is, whereas I believe that those readers have not troubled themselves to understand what he is saying, and, therefore, he is just as misconstrued as those who experience / have experienced depression often are.

Far be it from me to defend Thatcher, whose beliefs and policies I despise, but I no more believe that her There is no such thing as society speech was given a fair press* than this article :


1. Fraser's first two paragraphs, i.e. setting the context for the rest of what he talks of, are about his behaviour at school, how children who behave like that now may be diagnosed with ADHD, and may even be prescribed ritalin.

2. Anyone who has watched the documentary Bombay Beach (2011) will have seen Benny prescribed with anti-psychotics, which I find even more horrifying.

3. The third paragraph I come back to, though the effective point is that, just as diagnoses of ADHD and prescriptions have risen sharply (there are nearly four times as many in just eleven years), so have prescriptions for anti-depressants.

I do not read what Fraser says here as saying that his experience amounts to depression, but the opposite, i.e. that it does not.

4. The fourth paragraph talks about how chlorpromazine (thorazine in the States) and other medications came to be used for the purpose of altering mood in psychiatry, and were originally used for treating infections.

I see nothing much wrong in inferring that, if a medication can be licensed, manufactured and prescribed for some other purpose, then the pharmaceutical industries have a motive for promoting them.

5. Fraser does not report them, but some recent studies have been quoted where it has been shown that the effect of anti-depressants is no better than a placebo. If true, that not only casts doubt on why the NHS spends money on them (or we take them), but also strengthens what Fraser is actually saying.

6. In his final two paragraphs, he brings together the industries' desire to make and market products with that of GPs to do something for patients (either because the patients are distressed and ask, or because, in any practice, there will be GPs who are 'more interested in' the physical side of health, and who maybe do not know better than prescribing when others would not).

7. Fraser has been demonized as if he does not know what depression is, whereas I follow him as saying that maybe things that are not depression are treated as if they are.

No one who knows how little training GPs (primary health, as it is called) are required to have in mental health would :

(a) Go to his or her surgery without establishing which doctors lean towards it, or

(b) Believe that the fact a doctor has prescribed means that it was appropriate, or that a referral to secondary mental health services, pressed as they are, would even be accepted.


To suggest that Fraser's article is really of a Pull yourself together kind is, I think, a hasty and ill-judged reading, stemming from anger and disappointment at believing depression to have been written off.

However, he would have done well to make clear that he is not disputing that depression exists, only that treating people as if they have clinical depression (i.e. without their having symptoms such as anxiety, waking too early or sleeping too much, not feeling much - or anything - emotionally, etc.) is not really doing them a favour.


End-notes

* Since I gather that she meant just the opposite of what people claimed - still, it all helped remove her.


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Golden sands of time

This is a Festival review of Bombay Beach (2011)

More views of - or at - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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18 September (Tweets / tags added, 3 January 2015)

This is a Festival review of Bombay Beach (2011)

Bombay Beach (2011) (we had no explanation of the name, sadly) took a little time to get used to, because it seemed (perhaps unnecessarily?) raw in the early shots, and, of course, one has (gained) expectations that what is near the centre of the frame will be - or be put into - focus. (I'm assuming that editing the film with some footage that meets this description at the start was a deliberate ploy.)

In any case, what I quickly came to experience as a real joy, since it is a principle that I try to employ in my photography, was the use of available light (which must have caused some difficulties in places). The whole emphasis on lighting, and on the flatness that gives a distinct horizon at sunrise and -set, was a hallmark of this film, as was the naturalness with which people seemed to get about their business, and come to mean something to us in the (relatively) short time (compared with Alma Har'el) that we (felt that we) spent with them.

Before I went in, Tony Jones, director of the Festival, said that I would want to see the film again when it is on release generally, and he is right - from the sounds of it, as he hopes to have Alma in Cambridge, plenty of time to think up questions before then. Until that point, what I will think about, other than listening to some of my Dylan tracks, is the hope that there was in all that I was allowed to witness, and try to remind myself that it is a privilege to see others' lives.

That said, and nothing to do with how the film was made, but I couldn't help being shocked at how much behaviour is controlled (for) by medication in the States. A young boy, clearly given ritalin because of ADHD (now quite well known in the UK), but also being given an anti-psychotic, then put onto 600mg lithium (instead of the ritalin, unless I misrember), which is one-half of the typical sort of dose for a six-foot man (the exact dose depends on metabolism). As to an explanation to Benny's parents of possible side-effects, particularly for lithium toxicity in the bloodstream, that appeared lacking.

Well, and I'm sorry that I forget his name, but as the elderly guy says who recovers from a mini-stroke, and whose appetite for life and what it is worth were wholly infectious, Life is a habit. For Benny, I hope that he may be able to form a habit where he is not overmedicated to meet others' ideas of who he should be, and the film, in its crazy phantasy ending, offered us that vision.


PS Very much an after-thought, and not intended to detract from the above, but I could not understand the point of the intermittently present and vividly yellow-orange subtitles: at first, they seemed to stigmatize the would-be college student, as if just his diction were not clear enough (although it was), but then they appeared at other times.

Sometimes, during the interactions in the Parish household, they were a help to know what was being said. However, most of the time I did not see the need for them, but, because of how much brighter they were than usual, I could not avoid three effects: they spoilt the appearance of the film, they drew me to read them when I could perfectly well hear what was being spoken, and, because of that, I could not block them out, and so missed important detail on the screen. If I could have pressed a button on a remote-control to turn them off, I would have done, and been happier.

The documentary Bombay Beach (2011), released by @Dogwoof, has this page on @IMDb... : http://t.co/gFe3jzomi5
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 3, 2015

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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)