I’d Love to Know What You Think of This

susan Says:

working on a piece about this, wrote a piece last summer on it.

But love Toni Collette.

Tony Says:

What is it about comedies on the subject of mental illness? Is mental illness supposed to be a joke?! I find them to not be that funny where I have pity for the protagonist and really begin to feel sorry that I am watching his or her life fall apart. I just don’t see the humor in it.

Andrew G Katsetos Says:

Thanks for this post. It helps clear up some of my misunderstandings about DID. Every bit of light helps.

rob Says:

I REALLY ENJOY THIS IT WAS INTERESTING.

tom Says:

the teen lifestyle satire funny. the ballet was too. i liked the line “why can’t mom be manic depressive like all the other moms?” otherwise a bit slow moving and didn’t hold my attention very well.

Katharine Says:

I haven’t mustered up the courage to watch it yet. It could be wonderful, but it could also make me really really angry. I sometimes get way too upset for my own good about representations in the media that I find distasteful or counterproductive, and I’m just really scared of how I might react to this. But it’s been on my radar for a while. Taunting me…

ttq Says:

love it..posting it on my blog, thanks for the heads up this very piece came up tonight out with friends, so that made two of us who had heard of it yet..

Gianna Says:

I saw the whole pilot show…it’s awful and I wrote about it on another blog…I was being generous because the author liked the show…I thought it was horrible..here is what I wrote:

eek…I can’t say I was comfortable with it…I know some people with DID but I don’t know enough about what their day to day life is like to know if it’s a good interpretation of what it’s like to live with that disorder…

I would want to hear their take on it…

I am a bit concerned that so far there is no indication that they are going to say anything about what causes DID…and that is horrible, insane, usually unimaginable to us garden variety traumatized folks, abuse in childhood…

so I’m concerned about making light of a very serious condition and not really enlightening anyone about what it really is like…or what causes it

It may turn out that later in the series they do such a treatment, but so far it does not seem like that is going to happen..

I love love love Toni Collette…but I’m not so happy about portraying stuff like this in ways that do not help people understand the true nature of really most mental health issues and especially this one being profound, horrifying trauma…

maybe her sister wouldn’t be such a cold bitch if she had been witness to said trauma…again, no indication that there was anything amiss in childhood.

jim Says:

I’d like to think there’s a good intention somewhere in the beginning of this, but I think tv has turned into almost intentionally driving people to the brink of insanity, then making a joke of any serious reaction, or disavowing any responsibility for it. (It sounds more conspiracy theorist to pin it on advertising attempting to trigger a primal panic buying response, but there may be some truth to that.)

What it turns into is someone with a shallow understanding of a real disorder basing a specific character on that. Then the character is focusgrouped into someone “more relatable”, because it’s difficult for a large audience the more realistic the character. Then they make it into a comedy, which would be fine *if they didn’t use the actual name of the disorder*. Now there are a large group of people that not only have an even shallower, secondhand understanding of a real disorder, they attach comedy value and surface traits of a fictional character to it. Works that overdramatize an illness aren’t much better in my opinion. I really can’t watch this stuff anymore. It’s almost creating something that they know has a built in audience of people that *have* to watch it, some of them with the illness, some who think they have it, and some who will think they have it but don’t. I think it’s horrible.

Andrew Says:

Really loved your blog. Especially the humour that you seem so capable of injecting into such a serious subject. I have been a depressive for 25 years and recently suffered a major ‘crash’. I find the process of writing my thoughts very therapeutic, especially on days when the ‘black dog’ really savages me. You have encouraged me to look for humour in my posting – especially irony. My blog contains the thoughts, feelings, emotions and experiences of everyday life. A life which at the moment is full of despair, loneliness, crushing isolation and hopelessness.
All the best
http://www.strayblackdog.co.uk

Sunshine4Shadows Says:

I liked it. Even though mental illness is serious, we can’t take ourselves too seriously. Imagine all the men who are married to a DID woman. I am pretty sure they could relate to the show, and it would provide some relief. And if it does nothing, it at least promotes some sort of awareness of mental illness, and maybe make one small creep toward a stigma-free society. *loved the manic-depressive reference by the way!*

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Johanna Says:

what bothers me most about this show: it may feed into the media-generated notion that this is one of the more common faces of mental illness in your community – not a rare disorder whose very existence has been questioned by some thoughtful people.

Twenty years ago we had an epidemic of therapist-generated DID or “multiple personality disorder” in which vulnerable women were convinced by therapists (alas, often well-meaning true believers) that their apparently simple depression, anxiety, eating disorders or relationship problems were a sign of hellish sexual abuse in childhood which had been completely repressed. The therapy often included hypnosis sessions in which the devout DID therapist fully expected to find alternate personalities, mostly children. These personalities were then “helped” to “emerge.” The result of this treatment in too many cases was a downhill slide for the woman seeking help – from sad and maladjusted, to hospitalized and apparently psychotic. Oh yes, and who had been instructed to have no contact with their parents or siblings.

While hospitalized for depression in the 1980’s, I was several times approached by therapists, nurses or enthusiastic lay converts who wanted to “explore” this diagnosis with me. Their laundry list of symptoms was so vague that almost any depressed woman could be spotted as a potential hidden multiple. Rather like child bipolar these days. Thank goodness I was not just suicidal, but also skeptical. Some patients in Chicago were not so lucky. Google “Bennett Braun” for a look at the era’s leading psychiatric exponent of these theories – and the women who sued him, for shaping them into the “multiple personalities” they eventually became.

Never mind all the idiotic movies like “Me, Myself and Irene” and the persistent confusion of schizophrenia with a split personality – as in such common cliches as “our national schizophrenia about teen sex”, etc., simply meaning that we are of two minds about the question. I am not sure what to think about DID – is this a very real, but very rare disorder? Or is it basically an iatrogenic, or treatment-generated illness? What I do know is, it ain’t the dysfunctional family next door. Do the producers of this show have any clue about this? Or since it’s such a good shtick, don’t they care?

Becca Says:

This is a stupid show with intolerable dialogue. I am always amazed at really stupid shows because in order for them to take place, many, many people have to collectively decide that someone’s terrible idea is a good idea. Steven Speilberg, Diablo Cody, Toni Collette: Really, guys? Ridiculous, over-the-top characters (This little dude comforts his unstable mom while drinking his CHAI?? A high school kid shoves his girlfriend while at school with people around??), not to mention that it’s painful to watch one-dimensional characters in a one-joke universe struggling to be clever and entertaining for long periods of time. I can’t wait until tomorrow’s Inauguration because I want to believe that not everyone with power and money is a headless chicken running around spewing forth waste and malarkey. I have a low threshold for smart people getting together and spending serious amounts of money to create trash, let alone trash that so brazenly obfuscates a serious issue that people are already ignorant about enough to cause problems.

Jim summed it up best: “It sounds more conspiracy theorist to pin it on advertising attempting to trigger a primal panic buying response, but there may be some truth to that.”

Dano MacNamarrah Says:

I have been in psych wards with people who have DPD. Even though my major mental diagnoses is Bipolar II Disorder, I can relate a bit. I cannot recall how I felt or what happened, in a different mental state. So, if I am depressed, I can’t remember feeling happy, nor anything that I experienced in a better state.

I watched the whole clip, much as one would go back to a bad smell. Does it still smell as bad? I love the actors and they do well, given the limitations of the script. It is a cartoon of a real diagnoses, with hints of actual life, such as tears or bottles of beer.

The Mum seems to channel Jolie from “Girl Interrupted”, the guy from “My Name is Earl” and just a hint of honesty in the first video diary clip. Which I am confused about, as there were no more diary entries.

I have a few side orders to my primary diagnoses. Most people do. I love the idea of a devoted husband and functioning kids in the face of mind-blowing illness. In my life, my illness has caused my father and sister to shut me out. They could not handle my depression and hospital stays. Maybe I need to move to TV land.

I wonder how long it will take to move beyond this caricature of mental illness? Monk isn’t much better.

When will we see characters who live with a mental diagnoses, yet are more than just the quirks and foibles of their illness? No person in TV land who has say, cancer, is defined just by that disease.

McBeth Says:

I was prepared to make choking hacking badbadbad noises when I saw that first episode but y’know what? It really wasn’t that bad.

Does the show need to shore up some of the acting and dialogue and believability? Yeah, probably.

Is it gratifying to see a tv family not sending their loved one with DID into a forced hospitalization or turning them out of the clan, the kind of thing that happens off-screen every day? TOTALLY.

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Laura Peranteau Says:

So far I thought the show was decent accuracy-wise: on the superficial level it went to anyway, for the introduction that it was (and for being a black comedy?). There were switchovers brought on by stress [check] (though we didn’t see why these particular things were “triggers” for her..but maybe we will…)…not remembering [check]. Thankfully, there was also a lack of both too-easy tasteless flippancy and melodrama on the other hand. At the same time, I didn’t see anything in the show yet that a dabbler in multiple personality movies of the past, or most people don’t already know (as they’ve melted into our cultural consciousness), right? But again, it was the first episode, so I think it’s hard to tell.

An interesting thing gave me hope for its trajectory though: in the rolling credits I spotted Dr. Colin Ross’ name as one of its consultants. (As a graduate student in clinical psychology, I have been interested in Dr. Ross’ pioneering work relating psychosis, dissociation, and trauma). Obviously, having multiple personalities is an easy gimmick to base an entertaining situation comedy off of that can even get cool liberal smart cred for being ostensibly boundary-breaking as long as it doesn’t prove completely insensitive. I just hope the show can go beyond the temptation to use it as superficial plot-fodder (and even go beyond how such disruptions could affect the family honestly) and ventures into the real bases of this disorder…a fractured self caused by (the current professional word) both intense and long-term trauma. (In the process, forming ‘alters’ that could cope—like a strong protector figure, or splitting off the part that couldn’t experience the trauma which then ends up staying that age). Dissociative Identity Disorder (a more telling name than multiple personality disorder) is what it says: an extreme case of dissociation. But how many people really know what dissociation is? Or even beyond knowing the basic the feeling of it – know why people get it? I hope the show doesn’t float over this.

As I have learned: this kind of deep pervasive and chronic dissociation arises from complex trauma otherwise known as DESNOS (disorder of extreme stress not otherwise specified) in the DSM-IV-TR or “self-trauma”: trauma that occurs over an extended period and results not in PTSD, but in more chronic problems: with interpersonal relatedness, somatic issues (see migraines, irritable bowel, chronic pain maybe?), addictive and/or other impulsive behaviors (utilized to control emotions for lack of having developed an working internal ability to do it), usually having a chronic sense of emptiness, of a wavering sense of self and the boundaries with others, and self-injurious behaviors (again also used to regulate emotions), including cutting. The fact is that it is a deep set problem, and not just a pain in the ass or a quirky way of handling (or nor being able to handle) stress or feeling ashamed etc.

I believe that it would also be a misrepresentation of DID if Tara was shown to be very functional (not to mention physically healthy) in every aspect of her life (and without having made sacrifices or hiding things a lot) and was already surprised by the depiction of a 17-year intimate relationship, and one with a seemingly unhindered sex life… Of course I am very interested in anyone’s knowledge of cases to the contrary. And at the same time, it’s refreshing to see a character like this who is relatable to and who we can get to know (with a nice balance of humor), without her illness being used: hyped or fetishized into melodramatic otherness and/or fear-inspiration…so here’s hoping that the show can both reduce stigma here of this highly misunderstood illness (via a cool nuanced sympathetic personification by toni collette), and do it without sacrificing honesty and complexity. I hope it can trust it’s audience. What do people really want to see? Will they push it? What’s the creator’s goal here?