Apparently Showtime doesn't want to know the REAL facts about DID, and what a person who has DID struggles with on an hourly basis. I feel insulted to have received an obvious "form email letter" in response to my heartfelt email to Showtime. What I saw in the first episode, is that Mr. Spielberg is using "sex, sex, and more sex", to sell a series.
At least with the massive number of anti-Tara emails that Showtime obviously has received from DID sufferers, they have included an "informative" video from Dr. Kluft; however, even in his short documentary, he did not address the magnitude of the horrific childhood sexual abuse that causes Dissociative Identity Disorder. The so called "consultant" that the writer, Diablo Cody is conferring with, had DDNOS, not DID. Apples and oranges... sigh.
Imagine for a moment, if you can: A new Showtime series called, "The Deformed State of Tara" - a COMEDY about a girl who confronts comedic situations in her every day life revolving around her dealing with her inability to climb stairs, her sexual encounters, and her comedic experiences with people staring at her scarred and deformed face and arms. (As a child, her parents had physically abused her so intensely, that her repeatedly broken bones resulted in a leg amputation, and the repeated burns the parents inflicted on her arms and face resulted in grotesque scarring which made her face appear as almost inhuman.)
This scenario is NO DIFFERENT than creating a "COMEDY" about a person who suffers from a disorder caused by repeated, early childhood RAPE AND INCEST. One might say that the results of childhood physical abuse are apparent to outsiders, but the results of childhood sexual abuse resulting in Dissociative Identity Disorder are also readily apparent to others in public. Raping young children is NOT comedic.
Does this life seem like a comedy?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JZcEsOQFXc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5DEV6OqPJk
TV’s Split Personality
Does Showtime's provocative new series "Tara" signal an evolution in how Hollywood portrays mental illness—or is it another sensational depiction of a serious condition?
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On a good day, Tara Gregson answers to "Mom" or "Tara." She may sit at her desk and contemplate sketches for a new mural or drive her kids home from school. But on bad days, like when she finds her daughter's stash of emergency birth control, she stops answering to "Mom" altogether and she doesn't see herself as "Tara" either. On those days, especially if Tara isn't taking the medications which treat some side effects of her multiple personality disorder, Tara is more likely to transform into one of her "alters"—a teenager, a prim and proper 1950s-style housewife, or a beer-guzzling, gun-loving male named Buck. (Article continued below...)
Though Tara's story is fictional, scripted for a new Showtime television series, her disorder is a reality for those diagnosed with what is formally called Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). This kind of illness is an easy plot device, but it is one that carries the risk of becoming caricature. Like many programs that hinge on medical issues, "The United States of Tara," has to walk that line between entertainment and accuracy. And there's a lot of pressure these days to get it right. "Tara" comes on the heels of a decades-long push by mental-health advocates to end the stigmatization and stereotyping of those with mental illness as villains, "schizos" or soap-opera characters with "good" and "bad" alter egos. There are now organized watchdog groups and activists that don't hesitate to complain when a depiction veers toward stereotypical or is overly negative.
To stay on the right side of the facts, producers hire medical advisors. But even those folks don't have an easy time of it. Richard Kluft, the clinical psychiatrist who serves as the consultant for the "Tara" series, took a look at the first episode and had concerns about how the seriousness of DID (and that its most common cause is thought to be childhood abuse) would be translated. It "was so funny, and so raucous, and so sexual," he says, that it gave him pause. But subsequent episodes became "more nuanced, more complex, more bittersweet, and much more genuinely like what we may see [as therapists]," he says. Kluft offers as much advice on the medical accuracy of the show as he can, though he says the writers may not always use it. At one point after glancing over a preliminary script, he pointed out that Tara's alters would not just pop out one right after another without commenting on the presence of the alter before her, and the script was changed—though Kluft isn't sure it was adjusted because of his input, or if the alteration was something the writers already had in mind. Though he's happy with the show overall, he admits he still winces at some of the depictions of Tara and DID and notes that the main character's more flamboyant alters are typical of only 1 in 20 DID cases.
Tara's creators are focusing on a rare type of mental illness, and an uncommon presentation of it at that. But the mere fact that Tara is a likable main character helps promote greater awareness. Until the last decade or so, well-rounded depictions of people with mental illness were rare. More often they were seen as a nonrecurring character, villain, or criminal. A 1992 episode of "Roseanne" suggested that "psychos" and "schizos" could easily dupe lie detector tests because they have no feelings. Schizophrenia—a mental illness whose symptoms can include hearing voices, hallucinations, and disordered thinking, is a common butt of television jokes. "He votes like a schizophrenic," quips one character on a 2005 episode of "The West Wing" to describe one member of Congress with an erratic voting record. This kind of flip and inaccurate portrayal can be a problem when more than half of regular television viewers report learning something new about a health issue or disease from TV programming, according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control.
One of the first breakthroughs in how the arts handle mental illness came a decade ago, when Tipper Gore, then the wife of the vice president, admitted to suffering from depression; as the president's official mental-health policy adviser she successfully lobbied for the first White House Conference on mental illness. Social organizations got in on the game, too. The Centers for Disease Control, after fielding medical consultancy questions for years, founded a separate California-based Hollywood, Health, and Society program. It's now a free medical resource for Hollywood writers, researchers, and producers. The Entertainment Industries Council (EIC), a nonprofit that had worked on substance abuse and other social issues since the mid '80s also widened its net to include mental illness.
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