Статті в журналах з теми "Mental illness – drama"

Objective: There is a dearth of studies examining how dangerousness is constructed in media depictions of mentally ill individuals who are frequently portrayed as acting violently. The aim of the present study was to identify the contribution of diverse technical, semiotic and discursive resources utilised in portraying a character with a mental illness in a prime-time drama as dangerous. Method: Discourse analytic techniques, involving systematic, repeated, critical viewings, were applied to a single program drawn from a sample of prime-time television drama episodes touching on mental illness. Results: Nine devices (appearance, music and sound effects, lighting, language, intercutting, jump-cutting, point of view shots, horror conventions and intertextuality) were identified as contributing to the signified dangerousness of person receiving care in the community for a mental illness. Conclusions: These techniques combine in signifying mental illness and a person suffering from it as dangerous. The findings suggest that mental health professionals working to reduce the stigma of mental illness need to have a reasonably sophisticated understanding of the practices and priorities of television production if they are to collaborate effectively with producers to create dramas that convey more human and sympathetic understandings of mental illness or to combat the negative effects of such portrayals.

Precision mental health (MH) holds great potential for revolutionizing MH care and reducing the burden of mental illness. Efforts to engage Asian Americans in precision MH research is necessary to help reduce MH disparities. Korean drama (“K-drama”) television shows may be an effective educational tool to increase precision MH knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors (KAB) among Asian Americans. This study determined whether KAB improved after participating in a K-drama precision MH workshop, and examined the participants’ perspectives about K-dramas’ utility as an educational tool. A K-drama precision MH workshop in English/Vietnamese/Korean was conducted with a convenience sample (n = 122). Pre-/post-tests on precision MH KAB (genetics and genetic testing, and MH and help-seeking) and a survey on K-dramas’ utility as an educational tool were administered. Findings revealed a significant difference in the pre- and post-test KAB scores overall, by genetics and genetic testing, and by MH and help-seeking. There were also significant increases in the overall post-test KAB scores by workshop (language) participation. Overall, participants responded positively on the utility of K-dramas as a precision MH educational tool. This study demonstrates the feasibility of K-drama as an innovative and widely available health education tool to educate communities about precision MH.

This study examines the depiction of female hysteria in August Strindberg's "Miss Julie" by analyzing its historical development, Julie's characterization, and the influence of neuroscience on the portrayal of mental illness in literature and drama. Utilizing a descriptive method, it investigates Julie's character and the impact of Charcot's theory on the stages of grand hysteria on her portrayal. The analysis is based on a close reading of the play, relevant literature on Charcot's research, and secondary sources to understand the relationship between neuroscience and the arts in the 19th century. A qualitative research design is employed to explore Charcot's research's impact on literature and drama. The study reveals that Strindberg's "Miss Julie" shows a clear influence of Charcot's stages of grand hysteria, with Julie being a good example of a hysterical woman. The complex portrayal of mental illness in the play highlights the impact of social and cultural factors on its depiction. The findings suggest that scientific discoveries, like Charcot's work on female hysteria, significantly impacted mental illness portrayals in books and plays, revealing the complex relationship between scientific progress and cultural perceptions of mental health. The study recommends further exploration of other pre-Freudian theories to gain a more comprehensive understanding of Strindberg's works and their portrayal of mental illness. In conclusion, the study emphasizes the importance of understanding the historical and cultural context of the portrayal of mental illness in literature and drama.

Objective: The aim of this study was to determine how the mentally ill are depicted in prime-time television dramas. Method: Fourteen television dramas that included at least one character with a mental illness, shown in prime-time during a 1-year period, were systematically viewed and analysed. Results: Fifteen of the 20 mentally ill characters were depicted as physically violent toward self or others. Characters were also depicted negatively as simple or lacking in comprehension and appearing lost, unpredictable, unproductive, asocial, vulnerable, dangerous to self or others because of incompetent behaviours, untrustworthy, and social outcasts, and positively as caring or empathic. Conclusions: These data are consistent with an overwhelming negativity of depictions of the mentally ill found in other forms of media and settings, and contribute to the stigmatisation of this population.

How do you deal with a family member with a severe mental illness? To what extent do you allow them into your life, when doing so causes stress and harm to your well being? In this work of philosophical short fiction, the narrator is suffering from a severe mental illness, but clearly loves her daughter. Her daughter has suffered the attention of her mother’s mental illness for years and has done her best to limit her mother’s effects on her life. The narrator correctly intuits that her daughter is getting married. She is not invited to the wedding so to prevent there from being a scene, and drama. No matter, she continues to focus on “planning” the wedding until she is eventually arrested.

This study aims to describe adult mental healing, which is represented in the Korean drama series "It's Okay to Not Be Okay" through several characters. This romance drama, wrapped in internal conflict and mental illness, has high ratings both domestically and internationally. Aired through the Netflix network, this series broke the record number of viewers and caused much controversy. This study uses a qualitative approach using semiotic analysis theory and data analysis techniques Charles Sanders Pierce. Pierce categorized the triangle of a meaning theory, which consisted of three main elements: signs, objects, and interpretants. The researcher analyzes the selection of text and images related to mental healing. The results showed that the characters in "It's Okay to Not Be Okay" experienced psychological disorders in the form of depression, anti-social, autism, hallucinations, Manic Disorder, and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. This drama encourages Korean people who have tended to be more aware of mental problems and the importance of healing them in the personal (non-medical) realm through the interpersonal approach of the characters. Healing techniques such as Butterfly Hug, Problem Solving Therapy, Interpersonal Therapy, and coping with past trauma are several solutions for mental healing.

Mental health is an important part of each human entity and requires constant monitoring and care. Equally important is creativity, as a source of prosperity and a springboard for activating one's mental and emo- tional functioning. How does third age and mental health relate to creativity? We investigate the effects of creativity on the maintenance and regaining of cognitive and emotional functions and the dynamics of relationships through six different forms of art. The action is based on the implementation of a program of intervention in a Psychosocial Rehabilitation Unit (Home) for elderly people with mental health problems, which examines the possibility of developing creativity. With arts as the main core, we draw on elements of art therapy, drama therapy, and psychodrama, which have been adapted to elderly needs and possibilities. Recognizing that Gerantagogy aims at the continuous learning of elderly, there is a need to examine its connection with Neuroaesthetics field.

Arts have consistently been part of life as well as healing throughout the history of humankind. Today, expressive therapies have an increasingly recognized role in mental health, rehabilitation and medicine. The expressive therapies are defined as the use of art, music, dance/movement drama, poetry/creative writing, play and sand play within the context of psychotherapy, counseling, rehabilitation or health care.Through the centuries, the healing nature of these expressive therapies has been primarily reported in anecdotes that describe a way of restoring wholeness to a person struggling with either mind or body illness. The Egyptians are reported to have encouraged people with mental illness to engage in artistic activity (Fleshman & Fryrear, 1981); the Greeks used drama and music for its reparative properties (Gladding, 1992); and the story of King Saul in the Bible describes music’s calming attributes. Later, in Europe during the Renaissance, English physician and writer Robert Burton theorized that imagination played a role in health and well-being, while Italian philosopher de feltre proposed that dance and Play was central to children’s healthy growth and development (Coughlin, 1990).

Mental illnesses often inspire artists and writers and are omnipresent in various works, yet the moral adequacy of portraying their images remained controversial: Erving Goffman (2010) had described the challenges the “discreditables” might have faced and the privileges they might get once being uncovered in his essay. However, Susan Sontag believed that wrapping disease in metaphors discouraged, silenced, and shamed patients in her Illness as Metaphor. This paper aims to center the discussion on what the diseases and the patients will represent and the privileges be demonstrated in these texts from a rhetorical aspect? By applying principally the theories of uncanny, abjection, and stigma, this paper has built a theory on presuming Meursault in Camus’s The Stranger has Asperger, then analyze the power of stigma in two recent works: the episode “ADHD Is Necessary” in Taiwanese TV drama: On Children, and a French novel: Nothing Holds Back the Night. The results showed that the mental illness can be an advantageous and necessary metaphor, just as an endowing “Mark of Cain”, threatening yet defensive. Meanwhile

Emotional intelligence (EI) is the ability to control and manage oneself and others in terms of feelings, emotions and behaviour (Goleman,1998). Malaysian National Health and Morbidity Survey (2015) showed that 600,000 children aged between 5 to 16 in Malaysia were diagnosed with mental health problems. Symptoms of mental illness if not treated early can lead to chronic mental illness. Changes in the way of learning in 21st-century learning require the current generation to equip themselves with EI to control feelings in a more challenging learning process (Mohd Faizul, 2017). Therefore, Malaysian Ministry of Education (MoE) is currently encouraging educators to incorporate these values into the teaching process to build a better future generation. In line with the 21st century learning skills communication, collaboration, critical thinking and creativity skills, along with values and ethic will be the focus in education. The purpose of this study is to explores the possibility of incorporating EI into the education syllabus through drama activities in Malay Literature Component known as KOMSAS (Komponen Sastera) for secondary school students. A survey was conducted among 20 experts who have been teaching Malay Language subject for more than 10 years. This preliminary study is aims to identify the understanding of teachers on the application of emotional values ​​and the process of creativity in learning. Moreover, it aims to identify how current educators apply these elements of value into their teaching and learning activities. The findings of this study showed that the teachers are aware of the EI as well as creativity in learning activities. However, the process of applying values ​​and activities happen unplanned and there is a need to design and develop a teaching module that incorporates creative process (CP) and EI in KOMSAS drama.

Abstract The article views O'Neill's two early plays, The Hairy Ape and All God's Chillun Got Wings, as dramatic expressions of traumatic experience. They dramatize posttraumatic memory that haunts the characters to the point of death and mental illness respectively. The plays are seen as tragic in a sense different from the traditional view of tragedy. They are defined as trauma-tragedies, the term recently introduced into the theory of drama under the influence of Ruth Leys and her explorations of trauma. This tragic mode brings the audience into the traumatic drama by providing it with the most intense physical sensation of trauma possible and in this way with a specific tragic catharsis.

The 2006 BBC drama Shoot the Messenger is based on the psychological journey of a Black schoolteacher, Joe Pascale, accused of assaulting a Black male pupil. The allegation triggers Joe's mental breakdown which is articulated, through Joe's first-person narration, as a vindictive loathing of Black people. In turn, a range of common stereotypical characterisations and discourses based on a Black culture of hypocrisy, blame and entitlement is presented. The text is therefore laid wide open to a critique of its neo-conservatism and hegemonic narratives of Black Britishness. However, the drama's presentation of Black mental illness suggests that Shoot the Messenger may also be interpreted as a critique of social inequality and the destabilising effects of living with ethnicised social categories. Through an analysis of issues of representation, the article reclaims this controversial text as a radical drama and examines its implications for and within a critical cultural politics of ‘race’ and representation.

Many people with mental illness face the double challenges. Not only do they struggle with the symptoms of their illness, they also struggle with the stigma that the society has towards their illness. Through this creative project, I would like to discuss how stigma towards mental illness affects those who suffer from it negatively, and how letting go of stigma benefits those who are mentally ill and those who are not. I use Erving Goffman’s theory on social stigma, and another theory regarding self-stigma by Patrick W. Corrigan and Deepa Rao. These theories helped me understand how a stigma can be internalized by people with mental illness, and how it further worsens their symptoms. Moreover, the theories helped me create my story and my characters as realistically as possible and suggest a plausible solution for the problem through my story. My project is in the form of a romance drama short film screenplay. It tells the story of Jae-in Kim, a counselor in a suicide hotline, who is falling for a guy named Jon-young Park. They have been talking on Facebook for months, and when they are about to meet for the first time, she suddenly finds some similarities between him and a depressed guy who often makes suicidal calls to the hotline. It makes her reluctant to build a deeper relationship with him, which becomes a barrier for their relationship, and also challenges her perceptions towards people with mental illness. At the end, when she finally lets go of her stigma, their relationship gets better, and she becomes more inspired to help the mentally ill through her job.

I think I can honestly say that I am a seasoned complainer, although I am careful not to attempt to be Mary Whitehouse and I do not assiduously scan the media looking for trouble. My interest in the area of stigmatization started with an episode of the TV drama Boon, where they suddenly had a character become ‘mentally ill’ so that he could conveniently shoot the hero to achieve a cliff-hanging end-of-series episode. Subsequently I specialised in the portrayal of mental illness in dramatic productions, joined the Public Education Campaign divisional network and had some media training. I have been listed as an expert in the portrayal of mental illness for five years but have never been approached for my advice on this area. However, following this year's announcement of the new Royal College of Psychiatrists' campaign ‘Changing Minds: Every Family in the Land’, I obtained all the names and addresses in Deborah Hart and Jill Phillipson's article above and stood ready to ‘do my bit’ for truth and honesty.

Performance Semiotics in Dramatic Performance is a study of the semiotics of theater or stage performances related to the theory of signs and sign systems in the performing arts called theater. Theater semiotics tries to understand the components of theater and establishes the assumption that everything within the framework of theater is a sign or sign. Theatrical performances are essentially a series of sign systems. This study aims to: (1) reveal the process of creating and presenting the performance art of the Mental Ill Ballad Drama, (2) reveal signs related to the activities of the Mentally Ill Ballad Drama performance actors, (3) reveal signs related to the appearance of the Mentally Ill Ballad Drama performance actors Jiwa, (4) reveals signs related to the spatial aspect or place of the performance of the Mentally Ill Ballad and (5) reveals signs related to the non-verbal acoustic aspects of the Mentally Ill Ballad's performance. This research was carried out at the Campus of the Indonesian Language and Literature Education Study Program, Department of Language and Arts Education, FKIP, Palangka Raya University, Central Kalimantan Province. The object of research is students who practice theater and perform theater. This study involved (1) lecturers who taught the Drama/Theatre Performance course, (2) drama/theatre arts workers, and (3) students who practiced and performed plays/theatre. Data collection techniques in this field research are observation, recording, recording, and interviews. The collected data will be analyzed using the theory of Performance Semiotics. The performance semiotics contained in the performance of the drama Balada Illness, are: (1) signs related to the process of creating and presenting performing arts, (2) signs related to actor activities, (3) signs related to actor appearances, (4) signs related to spatial aspects, and (5) signs related to non-verbal acoustics.

PurposeThis critical review of historical and contemporary literature explores the role of television media in the prevalence of stigma towards persons experiencing a mental health challenge. In addition to this, the purpose of this paper is to examine the notion of perceived dangerousness, which is a concept where persons with mental illness are thought by others to be inherently dangerous.Design/methodology/approachA vigorous search of databases was undertaken for articles published between 2000 and 2016. Some seminal literature prior to 2000 was used to compare historical data with current literature. In total, 1,037 publications were reviewed against inclusion criteria.FindingsWhile mental illness stigma has received much attention in the literature, television media and public perceptions of dangerousness have not. While these concepts are complex and multi-factorial, what we do understand is that approaches to address stigma have been largely unsuccessful, and that persons experiencing mental health challenges continue to be significantly disadvantaged.Practical implicationsImplications to practice for clinicians working in mental health on this issue have not been adequately explored within the literature. While media guidelines assist journalists to make informed choices when they portray mental health issues in television news, there are no such guidelines to inform drama television viewing.Originality/valueSignificantly, television’s role in perpetuation of perceptions of dangerousness has not been adequately explored as a combined co-occurring factor associated with the stigmatisation and avoidance of persons experiencing a mental health challenge. In an era when mental health challenges are on the rise, it is of great importance that we collectively seek to minimise negative impacts and improve the experiences of those with a mental health challenge through addressing stigma both individually and in television media.

The article studies the motif of mental illness in the works of two littleknown writers of the late XIX – early XX centuries: M.I. Pantyukhov (1880 –1910) and A. Mire (1874–1913). Pantyukhov's novella «The Silence and The Old Man» and Mire’s short stories «The Insane», «At Bicêtre» and drama «The Defeated» were analyzed. These works were selected as they all are characterized by the motif of mental illness and psychological dissonance. The aim of the analysis was to study the characters showing symptoms of a mental disorder and determine their function in the narrative. Having a long history, the mad hero type became peculiarly popular in the Russian literature of the named period as those texts reflected the perturbations of the turning stage of the history and a crisis state of people’s minds those processes led to. The problem of madness was addressed by both key writers and obscure authors. The writers under study might be interested in that topic because of their personal lives, too: both of them suffered from mental disorders and happened to be patients at a hospital. Paradoxically, despite their addled minds, Pantukhov’s and Mire’s characters grasp the truths which are unobtainable for mentally healthy people and, due to this, become social malady denouncers and – sometimes – moral crusaders. Apart from having a specific, «sick» view of life, mad heroes are extremely vulnerable which makes them victims unable to resist the cruelty of life.

AimsExperiential learning, such as simulation-based training, is widely used in health education. Dramatic self-expression adds another layer through enacted perspective taking, and embodied self-exploration of interaction with others, to foster situated learning. We describe the evaluation of an innovative drama-based experiential learning project involving collaboration between multidisciplinary mental healthcare staff and people with lived experience of mental illness. The programme was facilitated at East London NHS Foundation Trust by a theatre company experienced in delivering workshops with service users. A weekly group programme took place online over 8 weeks during the COVID-19 pandemic and included activities of improvisation, embodied enactments and debriefing. The programme led to co-production of a drama piece that was filmed and distributed online. It was hypothesised that the experiential learning might result in individual benefits for all participants, such as improved well-being and increased mutual understanding of each other's experience of mental health care. The project aimed to improve relationships between healthcare disciplines, and between staff and service users. Additionally, aims were to empower service users, and support staff to practice core interpersonal skills. Objectives of the evaluation were to study the impact of the experiential learning, understand participants’ experience, and explore challenges and benefits.MethodsA mixed methods approach was taken to evaluate the programme. Following completion of the project, participants were invited to complete a questionnaire utilising a Likert scale rating of overall satisfaction with the project, perceived benefit and impact on specific domains such as working with others. One-to-one semi-structured interviews were conducted according to a topic-guide, and qualitative data were analysed using open & axial coding for thematic analysis.Results11 participants, including Psychiatrists, Occupational Therapists and current service users, completed the experiential learning and filming. Questionnaire data suggested participants were highly satisfied with the learning and felt it would be valuable to others. Themes include the positive experience of creativity, dismantling of hierarchy, improved empathy, confidence and connection. Potential challenges were digital inequality and lack of dedicated time for professional development.ConclusionA drama-based experiential learning group programme for healthcare staff and service users is a highly beneficial learning experience. Participants describe changes on a personal level as well as improved understanding of others’ perspectives. This form of experiential learning features collaborative working that aligns with principles of co-production and supports the development of interpersonal skills; the findings suggest that drama-based experiential learning is a useful method in health education to complement knowledge acquisition.

Purpose: This study was conducted to analyze Korean research papers in which Interpersonal Caring Theory was applied and suggest future directions for effective application and development. Methods: Data collection was done through electronic databases RISS, KISS, DBpia, NDSL and SCHOLAR. Twenty papers were analyzed according to general characteristics, interventions, variables and findings. Results: The number of published papers per publication year was 5 in the 2000s and 15 in the 2010s. The type of research design was for case studies, 1, for survey studies, 8 and for quasi experimental studies, 11. Participants in the studies included students, nurses, patients, office workers, volunteers and widows. Interventions used included drama therapy, Enneagram based interpersonal caring, horticulture, hospice, multimedia, music and rehabilitation. Variables that were related to Interpersonal Caring work included anxiety, college life adjustment, emotional intelligence, grief, happiness heart rate variability, hope, interpersonal caring behaviors, interpersonal relations, job stress, knowledge on self illness, loneliness, mental health, quality of life, self-esteem, serum cortisol, social behavior and stress coping. Emotional intelligence, interpersonal relations, job stress, loneliness and self-esteem were among the variables that did not work. Conclusion: The results show that Interpersonal Caring Theory can be a micro-range theory of nursing care that can be applied with clients in many fields by converging with various activities.

How can writing about the collective cultural trauma of the Covid-19 pandemic help in an autobiographical illness narrative about coming to terms with pre-existing Dissociative Identity Disorder? This disorder is characterised by inner plurality, autobiographical amnesia, and difficulties in discerning past from present times. Thinking about how to recall let alone organise such a life story might appear, at first, to be an impossible challenge. Might slow-thinking (coined by Kahneman 2011) through critical reading of comparisons between personal experiences and collective cultural experiences of trauma be a resolution? This lived experience account shares how the pandemic triggered fast-thinking dissociative symptoms but in so doing, gave me the story pieces to start forming a narrative about my earlier childhood trauma. Through slow, comparative readings of this personal experience with classic literary and collective cultural experiences of historical traumas, a co-produced narrative emerges. As a result, instead of the therapeutic creative writing modes that are gaining much traction in third sector mental health programmes and wellbeing forums (such as therapy journals, expressive writing or drama role play, see for instance Sampson 2007), the focus here is on how auto-ethnographic self-therapy can also provide new directions for narrative recovery in pluralistic trauma processing.

Social media sites are websites used as mediums to create and share various types of contents over the internet. These sites can also be accessed through applications on mobile gadgets. Different social media sites are available for free, and most teenagers or youths have at least one active account. They use social media sites to connect and share their online profiles, daily activities, stories, and emotions. Depending on their social settings, their activities may or may not be seen by others. One of the latest trends that is spreading over the social media is the Korean Pop entertainment or popularly known as KPop. Over the social media, youths share and express how they feel about their Korean celebrities, music, and drama. However, the issue of excessive sharing of emotion-sharing over social media may increase the risk of mental illness and affect their mental health. Their obsession to keep up-to-date with their idols might lead or cause adverse consequences on their emotional states of mind. Thus, the aim of this research is to study the changes of youths’ emotions in two different countries which are Malaysia and Korea that are related to the KPop trend. We extract texts from tweets from Twitter social media sites using the Twitter API as the basis of our study. Then, the keyword 'KPop' is used to filter the tweets. Web mining model classifies the 12,000 tweets into six emotion categories, which are joy, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, and surprise. The system then records the emotion changes and the triggering events respectively.

This note links three hitherto separate subjects: role-taking, meditation, and theories of emotion, in order to conceptualize the makeup of the self. The idea of role-taking plays a central part in sociological theories of the self. Meditation implies the same process in terms of a deep self able to witness itself. Drama theories also depend upon a deep self that establishes a safe zone for resolving intense emotions. All three approaches imply both a creative deep self and the everyday self (ego) that is largely automated. The creativity of the deep self is illustrated with a real life example: an extraordinary psychotherapy experiment appears to have succeeded because it was based entirely on the intuitions of the therapist. At the other end from intuition, in one of her novels, Virginia Woolf suggested three crucial points about automated thought: incredible speed, role-taking, and by implication, the presence of a deep self. This essay goes on to explain how the ego is repetitive to the extent that it becomes mostly, and in unusual cases, completely automated (as in most dreams and all hallucinations). The rapidity of ordinary discourse and thought usually means that it is superficial, leading to greater and greater dysfunction, and less and less emotion. This idea suggests a new approach to the basis of ‘mental illness’ and of modern alienation.

माधुरी नाटककी दुलहीसाहेबका असामान्य चरित्रको विश्लेषण शीर्षकभित्र दुलहीसाहेबकाअसामान्य अवस्थाको विश्लेषण गरिएको छ । ऊ आफ्नो सानो छोरो डिप्थेरिया रोगले औषधीगर्दागदै मृत्यु भएपश्चात् पुत्रवियोगको पीडाका कारण असामान्य अवस्थामा पुगेपछि घरकाप्रत्येक व्यक्तिलाई शङ्काले हेर्ने, कसैलाई पनि विश्वास नगरी चिन्ताग्रस्त हुँदा असामान्यअवस्थामा पुगेकी छ । मरेको छोरो फर्किएर आई कपडा लागाउँछ भन्ने, भान्सेले खाना पकाउँदाविष प्रयोग गरेको ठान्ने, नातामा दाजुबहिनी पर्ने माधुरी र प्राणराजालाई प्रेमीप्रेमिका ठानीअनेक शङ्का गर्ने दुलहीसाहेबको चरित्र पुत्रवियोग र सौतेनी ईष्र्याकाकारण असामान्य बनेकोउसको व्यवहारलाई मनोवैज्ञानिक आधारमा हेरिएको छ । यहाँ विषयपरिचय, अध्ययनकोविधि, नाट्यवस्तु, व्यवहारका आधारमा, प्रकृतिका आधारमा, समायोजनका आधारमा,अभिवृत्तिका आधारमा, संवेगात्मक परिपक्वताका आधारमा, मानसिक अन्तद्र्वन्द्वका आधारमा,मानसिक अस्वस्थताजस्ता विभिन्न उपशीर्षकका आधारमा दुलहीसाहेबका असामान्य चरित्रकोमनोवैज्ञानिक सिद्धान्तअनुसार विश्लेषण गरिएको छ । दुलहीसाहेबको चरित्रमा के कस्तो समस्यारहेको छ? भन्ने प्राज्ञिक समस्याको समाधान खोज्ने कार्य गरी दुलहीसाहेबको चरित्र असामान्यभएको निष्कर्ष निकालिएको छ । {Analysis of Dulhaisaheb's Unusual Character in Madhuri Natak After her young son died of diphtheria while undergoing treatment, she became abnormal due to the pain of miscarriage.The behavior of the bride, who thinks that the dead son will come back and put on clothes, that the cook has used poison in cooking, that Madhuri, who is related to her brother, and Pranaraja, who have many suspicions, are abnormal due to miscarriage and stepmother jealousy, has been looked at on psychological basis. Here the subject matter, the method of study, the drama, the behavior, the nature, the adjustment, the aptitude, the emotional maturity, On the basis of mental infighting, various sub-headings such as mental illness, the unusual character of the bride has been analyzed according to the psychological theory. What is the problem with Dulahisaheb's character? It has been concluded that the character of Dulahisaheb is unusual by searching for a solution to the academic problem.}

माधुरी नाटककी दुलहीसाहेबका असामान्य चरित्रको विश्लेषण शीर्षकभित्र दुलहीसाहेबकाअसामान्य अवस्थाको विश्लेषण गरिएको छ । ऊ आफ्नो सानो छोरो डिप्थेरिया रोगले औषधीगर्दागदै मृत्यु भएपश्चात् पुत्रवियोगको पीडाका कारण असामान्य अवस्थामा पुगेपछि घरकाप्रत्येक व्यक्तिलाई शङ्काले हेर्ने, कसैलाई पनि विश्वास नगरी चिन्ताग्रस्त हुँदा असामान्यअवस्थामा पुगेकी छ । मरेको छोरो फर्किएर आई कपडा लागाउँछ भन्ने, भान्सेले खाना पकाउँदाविष प्रयोग गरेको ठान्ने, नातामा दाजुबहिनी पर्ने माधुरी र प्राणराजालाई प्रेमीप्रेमिका ठानीअनेक शङ्का गर्ने दुलहीसाहेबको चरित्र पुत्रवियोग र सौतेनी ईष्र्याकाकारण असामान्य बनेकोउसको व्यवहारलाई मनोवैज्ञानिक आधारमा हेरिएको छ । यहाँ विषयपरिचय, अध्ययनकोविधि, नाट्यवस्तु, व्यवहारका आधारमा, प्रकृतिका आधारमा, समायोजनका आधारमा,अभिवृत्तिका आधारमा, संवेगात्मक परिपक्वताका आधारमा, मानसिक अन्तद्र्वन्द्वका आधारमा,मानसिक अस्वस्थताजस्ता विभिन्न उपशीर्षकका आधारमा दुलहीसाहेबका असामान्य चरित्रकोमनोवैज्ञानिक सिद्धान्तअनुसार विश्लेषण गरिएको छ । दुलहीसाहेबको चरित्रमा के कस्तो समस्यारहेको छ? भन्ने प्राज्ञिक समस्याको समाधान खोज्ने कार्य गरी दुलहीसाहेबको चरित्र असामान्यभएको निष्कर्ष निकालिएको छ । {Analysis of Dulhaisaheb's Unusual Character in Madhuri Natak After her young son died of diphtheria while undergoing treatment, she became abnormal due to the pain of miscarriage.The behavior of the bride, who thinks that the dead son will come back and put on clothes, that the cook has used poison in cooking, that Madhuri, who is related to her brother, and Pranaraja, who have many suspicions, are abnormal due to miscarriage and stepmother jealousy, has been looked at on psychological basis. Here the subject matter, the method of study, the drama, the behavior, the nature, the adjustment, the aptitude, the emotional maturity, On the basis of mental infighting, various sub-headings such as mental illness, the unusual character of the bride has been analyzed according to the psychological theory. What is the problem with Dulahisaheb's character? It has been concluded that the character of Dulahisaheb is unusual by searching for a solution to the academic problem.}

This study was exploring the use of films/dramas in giving awareness towards mental illness among society. Objective of this study was to explore the use of films in giving awareness on mental illness to the community. The study used qualitative research design. There were 11 participants of this study which consisted of three stages of human development (adolescent, early and late adulthood). They also come from varies background such as different work setting, age, occupation as well as level of education. The varies background among participants were provided different answers of questions. The method of data collection was an interview with semi-structured questions. Analysis of data using Thematic Analysis. Findings showed few themes have been found from the interview such as personality of participants that lead them to watch this type of films/dramas, effect after they watched this type of films/dramas, perception of participants towards mental illness films/dramas, learning process and suggestion to improve this type of films/dramas in Malaysia. The implication of this study, participants gaining more awareness on mental illness after watching type of films/dramas. They also found this genre of films/dramas enable to educate them to be open with people who suffer from mental illness. In conclusion, future researcher can explore the effect of watching mental illness genre films/dramas towards self-development among society.

AimsThe aims of this project were to assess how well the Netflix drama 13 Reasons Why portrayed suicide, in terms of both accuracy and safety, and to discuss the potential effect this could have on viewers.BackgroundPsychiatric content within dramatic media can have measurable effects on the population, such as reinforcing stigma around mental illness. Given the show's focus on a character's suicide, the most serious effect here would be suicide contagion.Guidelines and regulations for the portrayal of suicide in media are in place to protect those who might be vulnerable to suicide contagion.MethodWe formed our own pro-forma of 42 criteria using existing guidelines written for both news and dramatic media. These criteria were formatted into positive and negative pairs; positive being instances of guidelines being followed, negative as guidelines being broken. These were further organised into 7 categories.Each episode of seasons 1-2 was then assessed against the criteria. Cumulative instances of guidelines being followed or broken were compared within and between seasons. Context of each instance was taken into account by the primary researcher, and we also highlighted instances of exceptional breach of these guidelines.ResultThe results showed an over-all breach of the guidelines, with no significant improvement between the seasons. Some categories of criteria, such as “asking for help” and “mental health”, were portrayed well overall. Other categories, such as “blame”, performed extremely badly.The most significant breach was the graphic suicide scene at the end of the first season, which completely disregarded Samaritans’ guidelines.ConclusionThe breaching of guidelines in this show was overwhelming. In terms of severity, although there were some positive themes running through the seasons, there were also worrying instances of guidelines being completely disregarded. This led to the conclusion that the producers of the show did not take their responsibility to young, vulnerable viewers seriously regarding the dangers around portraying suicide.Suggestions from this study are that more guidelines around suicide are needed specifically for dramatic media, and that existing guidelines should be conflated and have stronger implementation by regulators. This implementation should potentially include overseas providers such as Netflix. Ethically, a significant challenge here is maintaining balance between safety and allowing artistic licence.

Captain Fantastic, an independent drama written and directed by Matt Ross in 2016, and starring Viggo Mortensen, addresses several themes that are central to utopian studies: the viability of an intentional community removed from mainstream civilization, the possibility of living in harmony with nature, as well as the ambition to inculcate alternative cultural values by a radical educational program. The main character, Ben Cash, decided to raise his entire family of 6 kids in the dense forests of Washington state. While training them to survive under extreme circumstances in the wilderness, he also undertakes their entire education, encouraging individual thinking and a strongly critical attitude to mainstream American society and culture. The sudden suicide of his wife forces Ben to return to ‘normal America’, confronting him with both the consequences of his parental decisions and his potential responsibility in his wife’s death. The essay interprets the movie in the context of the American utopian tradition, particularly its individualist variety exemplified by the myth of the American Adam and the ideas of Thoreau's Walden (1854). Captain Fantastic fulfils a crucial generic criterion by skillfully satirizing some of the characteristic features and attitudes of mainstream American culture through the eyes of the children who experience it for the first time, subjecting the conventional ‘American utopia’ to a trenchant criticism. At the same time, it also questions the possibility of radical alterity: can a single family defy society by re-enacting a mythical American pattern and abandoning civilization to raise their kids in the woods? Do parents have the right to experiment on their children after their utopian hopes of opposing American capitalist society have been dashed? The clash of utopias is ultimately resolved by Ben's decision to admit his responsibility for his wife's mental illness and death and to give up the backwoods utopia and settle on a farm, conforming to another fundamental American symbol: the pastoral ideal of the garden.

ObjectivesTo determine acceptability and feasibility of a theatre-based wellness programme to support the health and well-being of people with long COVID.DesignSingle-group, repeated-measures feasibility study.SettingCommunity centre and online.ParticipantsAdults with diagnosed long COVID experiencing breathlessness, pain and/or loneliness.InterventionSix-week participatory creative programme delivered to one online and one in-person group facilitated by movement, voice and drama consultants using breathing, visualisation, singing, poetry, storytelling and movement exercises.Primary outcome measuresProgramme acceptability and feasibility measured via uptake, reasons for non-attendance and barriers to engagement.Secondary outcome measuresFeasibility of recruitment and data collection procedures measured through proportion of missing data and follow-up rates, mechanisms of action of the programme identified through qualitative interviews, changes in mental health, well-being, quality of life, loneliness, social support, fatigue, breathlessness and post-COVID-19 functional status at 8-week follow-up.Results21 people expressed interest in participating, 20 people took part in the programme, 19 completed baseline and 16 completed follow-up assessments. Participants attended an average of 4.8 of 6 sessions (SD=1.5, range 2–6). Exploratory analyses demonstrated significant improvements in self-rated health (t-test mean difference=0.12, 95% CI=0.00, 0.23, p=0.04) and chronic fatigue symptoms (mean difference=−3.50, 95% CI=−6.97, –0.03, p=0.05) at 8 weeks. Key mechanisms of action that supported health and well-being included: increased sense of community, illness acceptance, experiencing joy, increased confidence in managing everyday life, increased ability to relax and reconnection with previous identity. Barriers to engagement included: activities being outside of the participant's comfort zone, ongoing long COVID symptoms, emotional consequences of sharing experiences and connectivity and connecting online.ConclusionsA 6-week theatre-based programme was perceived as acceptable to most participants and resulted in some positive psychosocial impacts. The findings provide a rationale for supporting the ongoing development and scale-up of this and related arts programmes to support people living with long COVID.

SummaryFifty years ago I noted that modern psychiatry rests on a basic conceptual error – the systematic misinterpretation of unwanted behaviours as the diagnoses of mental illnesses pointing to underlying neurological diseases susceptible to pharmacological treatments. I proposed instead that we view persons called ‘mental patients' as active players in real life dramas, not passive victims of pathophysiological processes outside their control. In this essay, I briefly review the recent history of this culturally validated medicalisation of (mis)behaviours and its social consequences.

The progress made in dentistry during the latest decades is due, conceptually, to the new, systemic vision of man, which has also taken place in this field of medicine. In this context, the link between organic and psychic is indestructible. Thus illness is understood as a drama in which the somatic process has a psychic value, and the mental one has a body value. It is known that the morphological and functional integrity of the dental system, health and vigorousness, gives the individual a state of well-being that affects his somatic and psychic health, as any disturbance at this level entails repercussions in psychological and social behavior. Such a disruption is the total edification that seriously alters not only the dental system but the whole organism, putting various biological and psychosocial problems to the practitioner. The total expression represents not only a physical disability but also a psychological one. A special importance in studying psychological changes at total edentulous presents the psychological aspects of senile involution. This is not only a theoretical but also a practical importance due to the increase in the number of elderly people. Through the researches of the present paper we intend to present the reality of the psychological manifestations in the total edentation, which is objectified on different methods of psychodiagnosis in the first part, in order for the second part to be addressed to problems of prosthetic psychotherapy.The study comprises a group of 43 patients, of whom 24 were men and 19 women with total uni or bimaxilar edentation. Total edentation can be and is responsible for somatopsychic alterations, along with other pathogens, general, local, social, which sometimes can take a dramatic form, converting, where the area is also favorable, a pure somatic disease, for those who are not in psychopathy or even psychosis, although these latter cases are extremely rare and especially in youngsters, which would disrupt not only the person�s behavior as an individual, but also their status, function and social integrity. The treatment of dental and psychological complex is mandatory for any patient, but especially for the elderly, where recovery is more difficult, with disease-specific disorders adding to those of senescence.

Clients with severe and persistent mental illnesses are often subject to biased definitions of health and wellness in western psychiatry. Therefore, the playspace becomes a site of potential for the client and the therapist to engage in a collaborative process of understanding and responsiveness. The following commentary outlines an individual drama therapy process that uses a flexible version of the role profile assessment; this intervention supports a client’s nuanced self-exploration. It also provides a shared language for the drama therapist to better understand their client’s inner reality in contrast to the repetitive, reductive narrative of the chronically mentally ill patient.

An increasing number of health professionals advocate for psychosocial attention as a vital part of treating mental health illnesses and not only a pharmacological intervention. Drama therapy offers a space where patients can improve socially, physically, and mentally, thus reaching a complete state of wellbeing. So, we aimed to design and evaluate a drama therapy program to develop assertiveness, quality of life, and social interaction in patients suffering from mental health decline. The study was performed under a participatory action design and a critical focus using a case study methodology that required a pretest–posttest and tracking of activities during the whole process. The results suggest that there was a rise in social interactions, an improvement in the quality of life and, significantly, assertiveness, perception of dependency, and isolation. The program improves the assertiveness of the participants and helps a person to feel less isolated and more independent. We conclude that the creation works help them to know themselves and favors their improvement.

This thesis is created with the purpose to explore the destructive nature of obsessive love from its reasonings, symptoms, and how it affects people around the perpetrator. While love is a widely-known emotion that has been a norm for everyone, many still do not know the dark side of too much love, which can be the result of mental illnesses such as obsessive love disorder and many more. Obsessive love disorder itself is a mental disorder where someone has an overwhelming obsessive desire to possess and protect another person. Using screenplay as the form and drama-thriller as its genre, I will show the development and symptoms of obsessive love disorder through Sinclair as the main character. She will also show how she manipulates people around her to fulfill her love obsession. In the screenplay, Sinclair will manipulate Charlot’s love for her by using him to get the man she obsessively loves.

Smoking is more common among individuals with mental health issues than those who do not have mental illnesses. In particular, among individuals with an anxiety disorder, a high prevalence of smoking has been found. Mood adjustment theory suggests that individuals with negative moods could adjust their moods depending on the type of television they watched. To understand this relationship better, we aim to examine how different television viewing can moderate the tendency of smoking behavior for individuals with an anxiety disorder. We used national U.S. survey data and concepts from the mood adjustment theory to answer our research questions. Our main contributions were to: (1) extend the mood adjustment theory by focusing on the association between a diagnosed mental disorder (i.e., anxiety) and risky behavior (i.e., smoking), and (2) examine the nuances of television genres by dividing entertainment television into excitement-valenced and ambiguously-valenced entertainment programs, along with information programs. The primary findings show that individuals with an anxiety disorder were more likely to smoke and this association was significantly attenuated when they watched cartoons, sports, and health information programs, but the positive association between an anxiety disorder and the extent of smoking was intensified when they watched drama, music, sci-fi, and television news. Patients with an anxiety disorder may take advantage of excitement-valenced entertainment programs and health-related information but need to be cautious in choosing ambiguously-valenced entertainment programs and news.

Theater plays a crucial role to represent the life and manners of a particular society. It acts as an informal tool for developing consciousness and promoting empowerment through education. Contemporary theater in India is no exception to this. It has the efficacy to build critical awareness among common people in general and women in particular. It critiques the social inequality and opens up the scope for bringing consciousness about gendered violence prevalent in contemporary Indian society. From 1970s onwards, the emergence of urbanization and industrialization had offered various opportunities for people irrespective of gender differences. Yet, it could not suppress the ‘other side’ of violence in Indian society. Mahesh Dattani, a pioneer in the world of modern Indian English Theater, is highly regarded as a social critic of contemporary urban life and manners. He sincerely presents dysfunctional families, individual dilemmas and societal problems, and gender issues including forbidden issues in his plays. As a conscious dramatist, Dattani reveals childhood maltreatment in his plays which focus on physical and mental illnesses among victims. He tries to sensitize the common people by representing the impact of discrimination on health as it is seen to be fatal in women. The present paper intends to analyze the impact of gender bias on women’s health as represented by Mahesh Dattani in his plays – “Tara” and “Thirty days in September.” In doing so, it embraces the educational implication of dramas through theater.

BackgroundThe experience of art offers an emerging field in healthcare staff development, much of which is appropriate to the practice of palliative care. The workings of aesthetic learning interventions such as interactive theatre in relation to palliative and end of-life care staff development programmes are widely uncharted.AimTo investigate the use of aesthetic learning interventions used in palliative and end-of-life care staff development programmes.DesignScoping review.Data sourcesPublished literature from 1997 to 2015, MEDLINE, CINAHL and Applied Social Sciences Index and Abstracts, key journals and citation tracking.ResultsThe review included 138 studies containing 60 types of art. Studies explored palliative care scenarios from a safe distance. Learning from art as experience involved the amalgamation of action, emotion and meaning. Art forms were used to transport healthcare professionals into an aesthetic learning experience that could be reflected in the lived experience of healthcare practice. The proposed learning included the development of practical and technical skills; empathy and compassion; awareness of self; awareness of others and the wider narrative of illness; and personal development.ConclusionAesthetic learning interventions might be helpful in the delivery of palliative care staff development programmes by offering another dimension to the learning experience. As researchers continue to find solutions to understanding the efficacy of such interventions, we argue that evaluating the contextual factors, including the interplay between the experience of the programme and its impact on the healthcare professional, will help identify how the programmes work and thus how they can contribute to improvements in palliative care.References. 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Background: Although there are many case reports and qualitative studies on the likely positive effects of drama on mental health there have been few quantitative studies with mentally ill patients. Aims: To assess the effect of drama training in patients receiving nidotherapy with a range of mental and personality disorders on changes in self-esteem and personality strengths over a 1-month period compared with two control groups, one with similar mental disorders and another without, who had similar assessments but no acting involvement. Method: A total of 19 patients were recruited from a mental health charity with current significant mental illness (active group: n = 6) (b) a control group of patients with current mental illness who were not involved in acting ( n = 5), and an additional control group with no current mental illness ( n = 8) The patients involved in drama were taking part in nidotherapy, an environmental intervention. Two self-rating scales, the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES) and Abbreviated Personality Strengths Scale (APSS) recorded changes in self-esteem and personality strengths at base-line and after 1 month in the participants. Random effects modelling was used to analyse the data. Results: The intervention group showed positive improvement in personality strengths ( p = .009) compared to the control group that had no mental illness, and also improved more than the control group with mental illness but not to a significant degree ( p = .16). Self-esteem recorded with the Rosenberg scale was lower in those in the acting group at baseline compared with the other two groups ( p = .088) but after acting training improved by 29% to be equivalent to the control groups. Conclusions: Despite the limited numbers in this study, and the consequent inability to make firm conclusions about the efficacy of drama therapy as part of nidotherapy, the findings suggest that larger trials of this approach are feasible and worth exploring. .

Summary Precision mental health holds great potential for revolutionizing care and reducing the burden of mental illness. All races and ethnicities such as Asian Americans, the fastest growing racial group in the United States (U.S.), need to be engaged in precision mental health research. Owing to its global popularity, Korean drama (‘K-drama’) television shows may be an effective educational tool to increase precision mental health knowledge, attitudes and behaviors among Asian Americans. This qualitative study examined the participants’ perspectives about and acceptance of using K-dramas to educate and engage Asian Americans about precision mental health. Twelve workshops were conducted in English, Vietnamese and Korean with a convenience sample in the San Francisco Bay Area in the U.S. (n = 122). Discussions were coded for themes. Findings revealed that all language groups reported positive reactions to using K-dramas to learn about precision health, genetics and mental health. Overall, participants shared that they learned about topics that are not generally talked about (e.g. precision health; genetic testing; mental health), from other people’s perspectives, and the importance of mental health. Participants expressed how much they enjoyed the workshop, how they felt relieved due to the workshop, thought the workshop was interesting, and had an opportunity for self-reflection/healing. This pilot test demonstrated that K-dramas has promise to be used as a health educational tool in a workshop format focused on mental health among a diverse group of Asian Americans. Given the widespread access to K-dramas, they present a scalable opportunity for increasing awareness about specific health topics.

Mental illness in media can shape viewer’s beliefs about mental health, help-seeking, and empathic behaviors. The current study sought to investigate how mental health and substance use is depicted in popular media targeted for youth. The visual-verbal video analysis (VVVA) framework was applied to the HBO American drama television series Euphoria to understand how mental illness, substance use, and mental health service use is portrayed, and how characters respond to mental health scenes. Euphoria follows a group of high school students as they navigate adolescence, mental illness and substance use. The VVVA provides a framework for social science and medical researchers to qualitatively analyze multimodal information (e.g., text, cinematography, music and sounds, body language and facial expressions) of visual content. This commentary will briefly describe the VVVA framework, provide an overview of how the framework was applied and adapted to analyze a scene in the television series Euphoria, note similarities and differences to the original VVVA framework, and benefits and drawbacks. The VVVA framework was flexible and effective in coding various elements (e.g., body language, camera angles) in a scene in Euphoria.

Onnellinen mielisairaalapotilas? Poikkeavuus ja erilaisuuden rajankäynti elokuvassa PrinsessaKotimainen draamaelokuva Prinsessa (2010) on löyhästi tositapahtumiin pohjautuva tarina pitkäaikaisen mielenterveyspotilaan elämästä Kellokosken mielisairaalassa pääasiassa 1940–50-lukujen taitteessa. Artikkelissa elokuvaa pohditaan osana historiallisesti ja kulttuurisesti vahvaa mielisairaiden toiseuttamisen traditiota, joka on audiovisuaalisessa mediassa näkynyt mielenterveysongelmista kärsivien ihmisten yksinkertaistavina, esimerkiksi potentiaalista väkivaltaisuutta ja vaarallisuutta korostavina representaatioina. Parin viime vuosikymmenen aikana tuotetuissa kuvauksissa on kuitenkin alettu erottaa merkkejä myös aiempaa myönteisemmistä tulkinnoista.Artikkelissa esitetään, että Prinsessan ote psyykkisesti sairastavia ihmisiä ja poikkeavuuden määrittymistä kohtaan on emansipatorinen ja medikalisaatiokriittinen. Kyseenalaistamalla totunnaisia konventioita, kuten lääkäreiden ja mielenterveyspotilaiden hierarkkista eroa, elokuvassa korostetaan toistuvasti näkemystä, jonka mukaan poikkeavuuden ja normaaliuden sekä sairauden ja terveyden rajat ovat aina keinotekoisia ja kontekstisidonnaisia. Elokuvasta onkin hahmotettavissa viitteitä ymmärtävästä, hyväksyvästä otteesta ainakin persoonallista erilaisuutta ja lieviä mielenterveyden häiriöitä kohtaan. Näkökulma vakaviin mielisairauksiin, kuten skitsofreniaan, jää kuitenkin osin epäselväksi, sillä niiden esittäminen ja reflektointi eivät ole elokuvassa keskeisessä asemassa. A Happy Mental Hospital Patient? Deviance and Seeking its Boundaries in the Finnish Movie PrincessFinnish drama Princess (Prinsessa, 2010) is one of the latest audiovisual media representations concerning people with serious mental illnesses. It is a roughly true-based story about a long-term mental hospital patient who claims to be a real princess. In this article, the movie is discussed as a contemporary part of a long historical continuum of representations of insanity in the western (media) culture. The tone of the representations has traditionally been negative and emphasizing the deviant and potentially violent nature of people suffering from psychiatric problems. Yet, during the past two decades, there have been some signs of more positive portrayals.In the article, I argue that the general tone of the film is emancipatory and critical towards medicalization. The boundaries between normality and deviance and also between health and illness are represented as wavering, unclear, and strongly tied to the different perspectives and contexts. This is achieved by challenging the traditional hierarchy and differentiation between the doctors and the patients by questioning, for example, health and so called normality of a chief physician. However, the reflection of serious mental illnesses, like schizophrenia, has no significant role in the movie and with most main characters, their diagnoses remain unmentioned. That, on the one hand, emphasizes the difficulty in seeking and defining the boundaries between health and illness, but on the other hand, begs the question whether the sympathetic portrayal is valid only for mild mental disorders or merely marks personal differences without a label of sickness, thus further marginalizing serious mental illnesses.

Background: Arts Psychotherapies (art, music, drama and dance/movement) have been integral to mental health care services for several decades, however consensus and transparency about the clinical process is still being established. This study investigates practice with a team of six arts psychotherapists working with severe mental illnesses in London, inpatient and community services. The study examines what in-session practice elements are used, whether there is consensus about what the practice elements are and why the arts therapists use them. Method: The methods employed in the first phase of the project are interview-based with thematic analysis, repertory grid technique and nominal group techniques used to analyse the data with the aim of triangulating results to establish greater validity. Results: The results showed that there is scope for developing a shared language about in-session practice elements within a mental health context. However the research examining the timing and reasons for employing those practice elements is still being undertaken. In this study the first results from an extract of the interviews illustrates a complex relationship between theory and practice. Conclusion: From the findings so far it would appear that within this specific context it is possible to see that there are ways of categorising the therapist’s actions that becomes comparable across the arts psychotherapies. From the therapist’s personal descriptions of his or her own practice, there also appears to be a close correlation between arts psychotherapies in a mental health community and inpatient context. Additionally, evidence-based practice models such as mentalisation-based therapies appear to have a close correlation.

SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) infection can result in long-term health consequences i.e., long COVID. The clinical manifestations of long COVID include depression, anxiety, brain fog with cognitive dysfunction, memory issues, and fatigue. These delayed effects of COVID-19 occur in up to 30% of people who have had an acute case of COVID-19. In this case report, a 72-year-old, fully vaccinated patient without pre-existing somatic or mental illnesses, or other relevant risk factors was diagnosed with long COVID. Nine months following an acute COVID-19 infection, the patient's depressive symptoms improved, but memory and concentration difficulties persisted, and the patient remains unable to resume work. These long-term symptoms are possibly linked to micro-hemorrhages detected during examinations of the patient's brain following COVID-19 infection. Patient treatment was complex, and positive results were attained via antidepressants and non-drug therapies e.g., art, music, drama, dance and movement therapy, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, and psychotherapy.

Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia depicts the last days of the earth through the eyes of a young woman, Justine, who is suffering from a severe depressive illness. In the hours leading up to the Earth’s destruction through the impact of a massive blue planet named Melancholia, Justine tells her sister that “the Earth is evil, we don’t need to grieve for it. Nobody will miss it.” We can read this apparently anti-environmental statement in one sense as a symptom of Justine’s melancholic depression. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defines melancholia as a form of depression that is “qualitatively different from the sadness experienced during bereavement” (419). It is as if Justine’s illness relates to some ungrievable loss, a loss so pathologically far reaching that it short circuits the normal psychology of mourning. But, in another sense, does her statement not strike us with the ring of an absolute and inescapable truth? In the wake of our destruction, there would be no one left to mourn it since human memory itself would have been destroyed along with the global ecosystems which support and sustain it. The film’s central dramatic metaphor is that the experience of a severe depressive episode is like the destruction of the world. But the metaphor can be turned around to suggest that ecological crisis, real irreparable damage to the environment to the point where it may no longer be able to support human life, affects us with a collective melancholia because the destruction of the human species is a strictly ungrievable event. The discoveries of Charles Darwin in the nineteenth century constituted a major thought event which placed the emergence of humanity within a temporal context extending far beyond the limits of human memory. Claire Colebrook suggests that the equivalent event for present times is the thought of our own extinction, the awareness that environmental changes could bring about the end of the species: “[the] extinction awareness that is coming to the fore in the twenty-first century adds the sense of an ending to the broader awareness of the historical emergence of the human species.” While the scientific data is stark, our mediated cultural experience provides us with plenty of opportunities to, in Colebrook’s words, “[domesticate] the sense of the human end” by affirming “various modes of ‘post-humanism’” in ways which ultimately deny the shattering truth of extinction. This domestication obviously takes place in one sense on the level of a conscious denial of the scale of the ecological crisis. On another level, however, environmentally conscious representations of “the planet” or “nature” as a sheer autonomous objectivity, a self-contained but endangered natural order, may ultimately be the greatest obstacle to genuine ecological thinking. By invoking the concept of a non-human nature in perfect balance with itself we factor ourselves out of the ecological equation while simultaneously drawing on the power of an objectifying gaze. Slavoj Žižek gives the example of Alan Weisman’s book The World Without Us which imagines a contemporary world in which all humans have disappeared and nature reasserts itself in the ruins of our abandoned cities. Žižek describes this as the ultimate expression of ideology because: we, the humans, are here reduced to a pure disembodied gaze observing our own absence [...] this is the fundamental subjective position of fantasy: to be reduced to a gaze observing the world in the condition of the subject’s non-existence—like the fantasy of witnessing the act of one’s own conception, parental copulation, or the act of witnessing one’s own burial (80). In many ways, the very spectacle or fantasy of our own destruction has provided us with a powerful means of naturalising it—environmental catastrophe occurs to and in a “nature” whose essence excludes us—and this renders it compatible with a psychology by which the human end is itself internalised, processed, and normalised. Ironically, this normalisation may have been affected to a great extent through the popularisation, over the last ten years or so, of environmental discourses relating to the grave threats of climate change. A film such as Wall-E, for example, shows us an entirely depopulated, desertified world in which the eponymous robot character sorts through the trash of human history, living an almost-human life among the ruins. The robot functions as a kind of proxy humanity, placing us, the viewers, in a position posterior to our own species extinction and thus sending us the ultimately reassuring message that, even in our absence, our absence will be noted. In a similar way, the drama-documentary The Age of Stupid presents a future world devastated by environmental collapse in which a lone archivist presides over the whole digitised memory of humanity and carefully constructs out of actual news and documentary footage the story of our demise. These narratives and others like them ultimately serve, whatever their intentions, to domesticate the end of humanity through the logic of a post-human mastery of the story of our own obliteration. The starker truth with which Melancholia confronts us is that the end of humanity cannot and will not be internalised by any process of human memorialisation. Von Trier’s film does not portray any post-catastrophe world from which we might be able to extract a degree of psychological comfort or residual sense of mastery. Rather, the narrative frame is entirely bounded by the impact event, which we witness first in the film’s opening shots and then again at its close. There is no narrative time posterior to the impact and yet for us, the viewers, everything happens in its shattering aftermath, according to the strange non-successional logic of the future-anterior. Everything begins and ends with the moment of impact. If the narrative itself is concerned with the lives of the characters, particularly the effects of the main character’s depression on her family relationships, then the film’s central event remains radically disjunctive, incapable of being processed on this interpersonal level through the standard cinematic tropes of the disaster or survival genres. The value of regarding Melancholia as an environmental film, then, is that it profoundly de-psychologises the prospect of our extinction while forcing the burden of this event’s unfathomable content onto us. Von Trier’s film suggests that melancholy, not mourning, is a more apt emotional register for ecological crisis and for the extinction awareness it brings, and in this sense Melancholia represents a valuable alternative to more standard environmental narratives which remain susceptible to ideological reinscriptions of human (or post-human) mastery. As ecocritic Timothy Morton suggests, “melancholy is more apt, even more ethically appropriate, to an ecological situation in which the worst has already happened, and in which we find ourselves [...] already fully implicated” (75–6). The most influential account of mourning and melancholia comes from Sigmund Freud, who described these attitudes as two different ways of dealing with loss. In the process of mourning, Freud states that there comes the realisation “that the loved object no longer exists” which “[demands] that all libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to that object” (245). The healthy outcome of this very painful process is that our libidinal attachments are free once again to take on another object of love; the lost object can be replaced according to a logic of temporal succession. Melancholia also results from a loss, says Freud, but this time it relates not simply or primarily to a replaceable external object but, more complexly, to something in the ego itself, not a discrete thing in the world but a certain way of being in the world which the lost object facilitated. Freud writes that the trauma of melancholia is thus manifested by the ego itself taking on or embodying the loss. The ego, stripped of its sense of being, comes to mimic the non-existence of that which once supported it. The “delusion” of the melancholic’s depressive state, says Freud, stems from the fact that something has ruptured her affective and libidinal attachment to the world, but this cannot be psychologically processed in terms of a replaceable loss since what is lost was never simply an external object. Her world is struck by an absence that cannot be mourned because it is kept alive as a non-being which she is. She has taken on the burden of this structural impossibility and does not pursue an imaginary resolution of it which, to invoke Žižek’s Lacanian terms once more, would involve her submitting to the subjective position of fantasy (i.e. becoming a witness to her own non-existence). The melancholic’s attitude is, Freud observes, “psychologically very remarkable” because it involves “an overcoming of the instinct which compels every living thing to cling to life” (246). The melancholic carves out an existence apparently contrary to nature. This is the context in which Justine remarks that the earth, as an ungrievable object, is “evil.” Her melancholia is never explained in the course of the film, and, indeed, we see little of her personality apart from the events which manifest her psychological crisis. The film opens with the moment of interplanetary impact itself. The great blue planet of Melancholia approaches and begins to swallow the earth into its atmosphere. We cut immediately to Justine and her sister in the moments just before the impact: the air is electrified by the approaching collision and birds cascade from the trees. Our way into the narrative is this moment of chaos and dispersion, but von Trier’s depiction of it, his use of highly choreographed slow-motion shots resembling tableaux vivants, distance us from any sense of urgency or immediacy. It is as if the closer we come to the collision, the less real and the more stylised the world becomes; as if the impact holds a content which cannot be rendered in realist terms. By contrast, the subsequent scenes focusing on Justine’s interpersonal drama use a shaky, handheld camera which embeds us in the action. The narrative follows Justine on her wedding day. As events unfold we see cracks appear in the wedding party’s luxurious facade: Justine’s divorced parents argue viciously; her wealthy brother-in-law, who funded the wedding, fears that the occasion may be ruined by petty squabbling, to his great expense. Beneath these cracks, however, we realise that there is a deeper, more inexplicable crack opening up within Justine herself. At one point she retreats with her newlywed husband from the tumult of the wedding party. We expect from this scene an articulation or partial resolution, perhaps, of Justine’s mental conflict, or at least an insight into her character. In a more conventional story, this moment of conjugal intimacy would allow Justine to express an “authentic” desire, distinct from the superficial squabbling of her family, a means to “be herself.” But this doesn’t happen. Justine inexplicably rejects her husband’s overtures. In clinical terms, we might say that Justine’s behaviour corresponds to “anhedonia,” a loss of interest in the normal sources of pleasure or enjoyment. Invoking Freud, we could add to this that the very objective viability of her libidinal attachments has been called into question and that this is what precipitates her crisis. If such attachments are what ground us in reality, Justine’s desire seems to have become ungrounded through the emergence of something “nonobjectifiable,” to borrow a term from philosophers Deleuze and Guattari (What is Philosophy?, 209). This “something” is revealed only in the second half of the film with the appearance of Melancholia and the prospect of its obliterating impact. Justine is drawn to this new planet, in one scene luxuriating naked beneath its blue glow. We could argue, in one sense, that she has discovered in Melancholia a correlate to her own self-destructive desire: the only thing that can possibly gratify her is the annihilation of the earth itself. However in another, more constructive sense, we can say that her melancholic desire amounts to a kind of geophilosophical critique, a political and ultimately ecological protest against the territorialisation of her desire according to a supposed acceptability of objects. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that, if desire’s libidinal attachments form a kind of ground or “territory” then all territories interact with one another at some level because they are all equally founded on “lines of deterritorialization” sweeping them towards a mutually shared, extra-territorial outside (A Thousand Plateaus, 9). Or, putting it in plainer terms: beneath every ground is a non-ground such that the earth cannot ultimately ground itself in itself. Every mental, material, or social territory is founded upon this global movement of ungrounding. The trauma of Justine’s melancholia refers us to something which cannot be resolved within the given territories of her social or interpersonal milieus. While her illness can be registered in terms of the events of the film’s narrative time, the film’s central event—the collision with Melancholia—remains irreducible to the memorial properties of storytelling. We may thus argue that the impact event is not strictly speaking an element of the film’s narrative, but rather a pure cinematic sign evoking a radical form of ecological openness. The film moves through different territories—conjugal, familial, economic, scientific—but what propels us from one territory to another is the impact event whose content is reducible to none of these territories. Of all the film’s characters, only Justine is “open” to this absolute irreducibility, this resistance to closure. Her openness to Melancholia is not determined by whether or not it can be objectified, that is, rendered assimilable to the terms of a given territory. Both her brother-in-law (an amateur astronomer) and her sister attempt to calculate the chances of impact, but Justine remains open to it in a manner which does not close off that which precludes survival. In the end, as Melancholia bears down on the Earth, Justine’s attitude—which in Freud’s terms is antithetical to the instinct for life—turns out to be the most appropriate one. The point of this article is certainly not to argue that we should acquiesce to the traumatic realities of environmental crisis. Its aim, rather, is to suggest that well-being and harmony may no longer describe the appropriate emotional register for ecological thinking, given the current urgency of the crisis. Human and ecological health may, after all, be radically different and incommensurable things. The great anthropologist and structuralist thinker Claude Lévi-Strauss once remarked: I am concerned with the well-being of plants and animals that are threatened by humanity. I think ecologists make the mistake of thinking that they can defend humans and nature at the same time. I think it is necessary to decide if one prefers humans or nature. I am on the side of nature (qtd in Conley, 66). Lévi-Strauss may well be right when he says that a common human and ecological health may be an illusion of wishful thinking. However, what if there is a common trauma, whose ineradicability would not be a tragedy but, rather, evidence of radical openness in which we no longer have to pick sides (humans or plants and animals)? What if the proper “base” from which to begin thinking ecologically were not a conception of a harmonious human-ecological whole but a foundational non-harmony, an encounter with which contains something ineliminably traumatising? In a recent paper, the philosopher Reza Negarestani proposes just such a traumatic account of ecological openness. All existence, understood geophilosophically, is, says Negarestani, “conditioned by a concatenation of traumas or cuts [...] there is no single or isolated psychic trauma [...] there is no psychic trauma without an organic trauma and no organic trauma without a terrestrial trauma that in turn is deepened into open cosmic vistas.” Ecological openness, in this sense, would be necessarily melancholic, in the terms described above, in that it would necessitate the perpetual precariousness of those links by which we seek to ground ourselves. Ecology is all too often given to a “mournful” attitude, which is, as we’ve argued, the very attitude of psychological incorporation, healing, and normalisation. Similarly, “nature,” we are told, holds the key to harmonious self-regulation. But what if today such notions are obstacles to a genuine awareness of the ecological realities facing us all (humans and non-humans)? What if this ideal of nature were just a product of our own desire for stability, order, and regularity—for some imaginary extra-social and non-human point of reference by which to attain to a position of mastery in the telling of the story of ourselves? References Age of Stupid, The. Dir. Fanny Armstrong. Spanner Films, 2009. American Psychological Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 4th Ed. Text Revision. Washington: American Psychological Association, 2000. Colebrook, Claire. “Introduction: Framing the End of the Species.”.Extinction. Ed. Claire Colebrook. Open Humanities Press. 2012. 14 April 2012. Conley, Vera Andermatt. Ecopolitics: The Environment in Poststructuralist Thought. London: Routledge, 1997. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 24. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1917. 237–58. Melancholia. Dir. Lars von Trier. Zontropa, 2011. Morton, Timothy. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. Negarestani, Reza. “On the Revolutionary Earth: A Dialectic in Territopic Materialism.” Dark Materialism Conference. Natural History Museum, London. January 12th 2011. Weisman, Alan. The World Without Us. New York: Picador, 2007. WALL-E. Dir. Andrew Stanton. Pixar, 2008. Žižek, Slavoj. Living in the End Times. London: Verso, 2010.

All critics declare not only their judgment of the work but also their claim to the right to talk about it and judge it. In short, they take part in a struggle for the monopoly of legitimate discourse about the work of art, and consequently in the production of the value of the work of art. (Pierre Bourdieu 36). As it becomes blindingly obvious that ‘cultural production’, including the cinema, now underpins an economy every bit as brutal in its nascent state as the Industrial Revolution was for its victims 200 years ago, both critique and cinephilia seem faded and useless to me. (Meaghan Morris 700). The music’s loud, the lights are low. I’m at a party and somebody’s shouting at me. “How many films do you see every week?” “Do you really get in for free?” “So what should I see next Saturday night?” These are the questions that shape the small talk of my life. After seven years of reviewing movies you’d think I’d have ready answers and sparkling rehearsed tip-offs to scatter at the slightest quiver of interest. And yet I feel anxious when I’m asked to predict some stranger’s enjoyment – their 15-odd bucks worth of dark velvet pleasure. Who am I to say what they’ll enjoy? Who am I to judge what’s worthwhile? As editor of the film pages of The Big Issue magazine (Australian edition), I make such value judgments every day, sifting through hundreds of press releases, invitations and interview offers. I choose just three films and three DVDs to be reviewed each fortnight, and one film to form the subject of a feature article or interview. The film pages are a very small part of an independent magazine that exists to provide an income for the homeless and long-term unemployed people who sell it on the streets of Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth. And no, homeless people don’t go to the movies very often but our relatively educated and affluent city-dwelling readers do. The letters page of the magazine suggests that readers’ favourite pages are the Vendor Portraits – the extraordinary and sobering photographs and life stories of the people who are out there on the streets selling the magazine. Yet the editorial policy is to maintain a certain lightness of touch amidst the serious business. Thus, the entertainment pages (music, books, film, TV and humour) have no specific social justice agenda. But if there’s a new Australian film out there that deals with the topic of homelessness, it seems imperative to at least consider the story. Rather than offering in-depth analysis of particular films and the ways I go about judging them, the following diary excerpts instead offer a sketch of the practical process of editorial decision-making. Why review this film and not that one? Why interview this actor or that film director? And how do these choices fit within the broad goals of a social justice publication? Created randomly, from a quick scan of the last twelve months, the diary is a scribbled attempt to justify, or in Bourdieu’s terms, “legitimate” the critical role I play, and to try and explain how that role can never be fully defined by an aesthetic that is divorced from social and political realities. August 2004 My editor calls me and asks if I’ve seen Tom White, the new low-budget Australian film by Alkinos Tsilimidos. I have, and I hated it. Starring Colin Friels, the film follows the journey of a middle-aged middle-class man who walks out of his life and onto the streets. It’s a grimy, frustrating film, supported by only the barest bones of narrative. I was bored and infuriated by the central character, and I know it’s the kind of under-developed story that’s keeping Australian audiences away from our own films. And yet … it’s a local film that actually dares to tackle issues of homelessness and mental illness, and it’s a story that presents a truth about homelessness that’s borne out by many of our vendors: that any one of us could, except by the grace of God or luck, find ourselves sleeping rough. My editor wants me to interview Colin Friels, who will appear on the cover of the magazine. I don’t want to touch the film, and I prefer interviewing people whose work genuinely interests and excites me. But there are other factors to be considered. The film’s exhibitor, Palace Films, is offering to hold charity screenings for our benefit, and they are regular advertising supporters of The Big Issue. My editor, a passionate and informed film lover himself, understands the quandary. We are in no way beholden to Palace, he assures me, and we can tread the fine line with this film, using it to highlight the important issues at hand, without necessarily recommending the film to audiences. It’s tricky and uncomfortable; a simple example of the way in which political and aesthetic values do not always dance so gracefully together. Nevertheless, I find a way to write the story without dishonesty. September 2004 There’s no denying the pleasure of writing (or reading) a scathing film review that leaves you in stitches of laughter over the dismembered corpse of a bad movie. But when space is limited, I’d rather choose the best three films every fortnight for review and recommendation. In an ideal world I’d attend every preview and take my pick. They’d be an excitingly diverse mix. Say, one provocative documentary (maybe Mike Moore or Errol Morris), one big-budget event movie (from the likes of Scorsese or Tarantino), and one local or art-house gem. In the real world, it’s a scramble for deadlines. Time is short and some of the best films only screen in one or two states, making it impossible for us to cover them for our national audience. Nevertheless, we do our best to keep the mix as interesting and timely as possible. For our second edition this month I review the brilliant documentary Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky), while I send other reviewers to rate Spielberg’s The Terminal (only one and a half stars out of five), and Cate Shortland’s captivating debut Australian feature Somersault (four stars). For the DVD review page we look at a boxed set of The Adventures of Tintin, together with the strange sombre drama House of Sand and Fog (Vadim Perelman), and the gripping documentary One Day in September (Kevin MacDonald) about the terrorist attacks at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. As editor, I try to match up films with the writers who’ll best appreciate them. With a 200-word limit we know that we’re humble ‘reviewers’ rather than lofty ‘critics’, and that we can only offer the briefest subjective response to a work. Yet the goal remains to be entertaining and fair, and to try and evaluate films on their own terms. Is this particular movie an original and effective example of the schlocky teen horror thriller? If so, let’s give it the thumbs up. Is this ‘worthy’ anti-globalisation documentary just a boring preachy sermon with bad hand-held camera work? Then we say so. For our film feature article this edition, I write up an interview with Italian director Luigi Falorni, whose simple little film The Weeping Camel has been reducing audiences to tears. It’s a strange quiet film, a ‘narrative documentary’ set in the Gobi desert, about a mother camel that refuses to give milk to her newborn baby. There’s nothing political or radical about it. It’s just beautiful and interesting and odd. And that’s enough to make it worthy of attention. November 2004 When we choose to do a ‘celebrity’ cover, we find pretty people with serious minds and interesting causes. This month two gorgeous film stars, Natalie Portman and Gael Garcia Bernal find their way onto our covers. Portman’s promoting the quirky coming of age film, Garden State (Zach Braff), but the story we run focuses mainly on her status as ambassador for the Foundation of International Community Assistance (FINCA), which offers loans to deprived women to help them start their own businesses. Gabriel Garcia Bernal, the Mexican star of Walter Salle’s The Motorcycle Diaries appears on our cover and talks about his role as the young Che Guevara, the ultimate idealist and symbol of rebellion. We hope this appeals to those radicals who are prepared to stop in the street, speak to a homeless person, and shell out four dollars for an independent magazine – and also to all those shallow people who want to see more pictures of the hot-eyed Latin lad. April 2005 Three Dollars is Robert Connelly’s adaptation of Elliot Perlman’s best-selling novel about economic rationalism and its effect on an average Australian family. I loved the book, and the film isn’t bad either, despite some unevenness in the script and performances. I interview Frances O’Connor, who plays opposite David Wenham as his depressed underemployed wife. O’Connor makes a beautiful cover-girl, and talks about the seemingly universal experience of depression. We run the interview alongside one with Connelly, who knows just how to pitch his film to an audience interested in homelessness. He gives great quotes about John Howard’s heartless Australia, and the way we’ve become an economy rather than a society. It’s almost too easy. In the reviews section of the magazine we pan two other Australian films, Paul Cox’s Human Touch, and the Jimeoin comedy-vehicle The Extra. I’d rather ignore bad Australian films and focus on good films from elsewhere, or big-budget stinkers that need to be brought down a peg. But I’d lined up reviews for these local ones, expecting them to be good, and so we run with the negativity. Some films are practically critic-proof, but small niche films, like most Australian titles, aren’t among these Teflon giants. As Joel Pearlman, Managing Director of Roadshow Films has said, “There are certain types of films that are somewhat critic-proof. They’ve either got a built-in audience, are part of a successful franchise, like The Matrix or Bond films, or have a popular star. It’s films without the multimillion-dollar ad campaigns and the big names where critics are far more influential” ( Pearlman in Bolles 19). Sometimes I’m glad that I’m just a small fish in the film critic pond, and that my bad reviews can’t really destroy someone’s livelihood. It’s well known that a caning from reviewers like David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz (ABC, At the Movies), or the Melbourne Age’s Jim Schembri can practically destroy the prospects of a small local film, and I’m not sure I have the bravery or conviction of the value of my own tastes to bear such responsibility. Admittedly, that’s just gutless tender-heartedness for, as reviewers, our responsibility is to the audience not to the filmmaker. But when you’ve met with cash-strapped filmmakers, and heard their stories and their struggles, it’s sometimes hard to put personal compassion aside and see the film as the punter will. But you must. August 2005 It’s a busy time with the Melbourne International Film Festival just finishing up. Hordes of film directors accompany their films to the festival, promoting them here ahead of a later national release schedule, and making themselves available for rare face-to face interviews. This year I find a bunch of goodies that seem like they were tailor-made for our readership. There are winning local films like Sarah Watt’s life-affirming debut Look Both Ways; and Rowan Woods’ gritty addiction-drama Little Fish. There’s my personal favourite, Bahman Ghobadi’s stunning and devastating Kurdish/Iranian feature Turtles Can Fly; and Avi Lewis’s inspiring documentary The Take, about Argentine factory workers who unite to revive their bankrupt workplaces. It’s when I see films like this, and get to talk to the people who bring them into existence, that I realize how much I value writing about films for a publication that doesn’t exist just to make a profit or fill space between advertisements. As the great American critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has eloquently argued, most of the worldwide media coverage concerning film is merely a variation on the ‘corporate stories’ that film studios feed us as part of their advertising. To be able to provide some small resistance to that juggernaut is a wonderful privilege. I love to be lost in the dark, studying films frame by frame, and with reference only to some magical internal universe of ‘cinema’ and its endless references to itself. But as the real world outside falls apart, such airless cinephilia feels just plain wrong. As a writer whose subject is films, what I’m compelled to do is to come out of the cinema and try to use my words to convey the best of what I’ve seen to my friends and readers, pointing them towards small treasures they may have overlooked amidst the hype. So maybe I’m not a ‘pure’ critic, and maybe there’s no shame in that. The films I’ll gravitate towards share an almost indefinable quality – to use Jauss’s phrase, they reconstruct and expand my “horizon of expectation” (28). Sometimes these films are overtly committed to a cause, but often they’re just beautiful and strange and fresh. Always they expand me, open me, make me feel that there’s more to the world than expected, and make me want more too – more information, more freedom, more compassion, more equality, more beauty. And, after all these years in the dark, I still want more films like that. Endnotes As of August 2005, the role of DVD editor of The Big Issue has been filled by Anthony Morris. According the latest Morgan Poll, readers of The Big Issue are likely to be young (18-39), urban, educated, and affluent professionals. Current readership is estimated at 144,000 fortnightly and growing. References Bolles, Scott. “The Critics.” Sunday Life. The Age 10 Jul. 2005: 19. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Ed. Randal Johnson. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993. Jauss, Hans Robert. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Trans. Timothy Bahti. Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 1982. Morris, Meaghan. “On Going to Bed Early: Once Upon a Time in America.” Meanjin 4 (1998): 700. Rosenbaum, Jonathan. “Junket Bonds.” Chicago Reader Movie Review (2000). 2 Sept. 2005 http://www.chicagoreader.com/movies/archives/2000/1000/00117.html>. The Big Issue Australia. http://www.bigissue.org.au/> 10 Oct. 2005. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Siemienowicz, Rochelle. "Diary of a Film Reviewer: Intimate Reflections on Writing about the Screen for a Popular Audience." M/C Journal 8.5 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0510/01-siemienowicz.php>. APA Style Siemienowicz, R. (Oct. 2005) "Diary of a Film Reviewer: Intimate Reflections on Writing about the Screen for a Popular Audience," M/C Journal, 8(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0510/01-siemienowicz.php>.