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
- 1
- 2
TV’s Split Personality
Email To A Friend
Please fill in the following information and we'll email this link.
These collective efforts laid the foundation for change. But the problem hasn't gone away, by any stretch. In November some mental-health advocates mobilized a campaign against ABC via e-mails, calls, and letters, protesting an episode of "Desperate Housewives" which, in their eyes, reinforced ubiquitous stereotypes linking mental illness and violence. In the controversial episode, it is revealed that Dave Williams, a stranger in the neighborhood, was released from "a center for the criminally insane." When confronted by his psychiatrist, he kills him and sets fire to a nightclub. Bob Carolla, head of the StigmaBusters program at the National Alliance on Mental Illness, which tracks such depictions, stresses the need to have positive portrayals of individuals with mental illness. "It really turns the stereotype around," he says.
For those in the industry, "entertainment is always the first priority," says Elizabeth Klaviter, the director of medical research for "Grey's Anatomy" and "Private Practice." But she says, "there's a responsibility to be as accurate as possible within those restraints," and to that end she is in almost constant communication with Hollywood, Health, and Society and sources like the EIC. Neal Baer (a doctor himself) who used to write for NBC's "ER" and is now the Executive Producer of "Law and Order: Special Victims Unit," also on NBC, remembers being critiqued for one episode of "ER," in which a young man with schizophrenia killed a doctor. He suggests one episode of a show is not a fair snapshot of the show's sensitivities to the subject of mental illness.
But the issue is about more than just sensitivity or social stigma, according to mental-health experts. Inaccurate depictions of mental illness can have serious consequences. Story lines that romanticize suicide as heroic, or the only way out of depression or a difficult situation can trigger "an already vulnerable person's motivation to engage in suicidal behaviors," explains suicide-prevention expert Madelyn Gould, an epidemiologist at Columbia University. Rarely is suicidal behavior and treatment a storyline in itself—though there are exceptions—such as "The Sopranos" storyline wherein Tony Soprano's son attempts suicide and is taken to a hospital for treatment. The show doesn't just leave it at that, following up with references to his psychological therapy.
Perhaps the most engaging recent portrayal of someone with a serious mental illness was Sally Field's Emmy winning 2001 role as "Maggie" on NBC's "ER". Her character struggles with bipolar disorder. Maggie's symptoms clearly leave her on-screen daughter distraught at times, but she is still depicted as a loving and lovable parent who gets treatment. Ironically, Sally Field is also responsible for one of the early television depictions of serious mental illness. In another Emmy-winning performance, she played "Sybil" in the groundbreaking 1976 television movie based on the true story of a woman with DID. While it has since been criticized for some inaccuracies, "Sybil" was one of the first sympathetic, fully developed depictions of mental illness on television. But it has taken a long time to get back to that kind of character.
"Tara," the newest face of DID, has joined the USA Network show "Monk" as the only current examples of television protagonists who are successful and have a social-support system, despite their respective mental illnesses. "Monk," a show about a highly specialized detective with obsessive compulsive disorder, has received mixed reviews from the mental-health community because some feel his condition never improves and his illness is sometimes fodder for laughs on the show. Still, mental-health advocates often point to the show, now in its eighth and final season, as a landmark.
For Klaviter, the growing discourse on such conditions both on- and off-screen means that "America is getting ready to let mental illness out of the closet." This summer, the Entertainment Industries Council brought together members of the media and entertainment industries, alongside medical professionals, mental-health advocates, and members of Congress to talk about perceptions of mental illness and ways to address them. But there's still a long way to go. As Carolla of NAMI says, "It's still two steps forward, and one step back." So stay tuned.
© 2009
- 1
- 2
Discuss