Masking the Madness

My Journey Through School....

[thelastdianneosaur]

Thoughts(11/17/15)

Reflecting on the past films we watched, there is often the thought of whether or not reality and  mental illness blend together to form the realities we perceive in our everyday lives, and if it is affected by how we were raised. Looking at a Beautiful Mind and American Psycho, both men demonstrated qualities associated withe mental illness through stages of their life, but often went unnoticed to the the nature of their jobs, often associating their quirks to a normal byproduct of their job and career. With this said, many people in our modern world often go un-diagnosed due to the common social constructs that society creates us to live in. 

[thelastdianneosaur]

Psychos on Wall Street

A financial-industry trade publication features an article claiming one out of 10 people working on Wall Street are psychopaths. One former CFO says, "It's probably eight out of 10."

Here is a compelling article supplementing the notion of the correlation between sociopaths and business men. Their courage, tenacity and quick wits are often applauds due to their choices in favorable outcomes, this masks their manipulative personalities and over the top performances.

[thelastdianneosaur]

This film was trippy!! Patrick Bateman can be perceived to be a pretty stealthy,  crafty serial killer, or a very delusional mental man. Either way, it is pretty bad. Looking at the beginning of film where Patrick kills many people and hires prostitutes and mutilates them, there are obvious signs of antisocial personality disorder, especially in his daily beauty routine and his physical regime to stay in shape, both of which demonstrate narcissism. When he lures various people into his apartment, including Paul, the prostitutes and Jean, all of whom he killed or attempted to kill. It is interesting to see that he did spare Jean from death, forcing her to leave, which is one of the only times he shows a sort of empathy towards another human, most likely due to her showing genuine concern for his health and mental stability. The ambiguous revelation of him having  hallucinated the entire thing is left to the view to interpret if he actually did kill those people or if he just imagined it all. Either way this film demonstrates the sociopath tendencies of people working in high risk careers, often having to put aside empathy and morals to achieve their goals. The idea of nature vs nurture also arises in the sense that he was born into wealth and therefore would have very little options to to forth and choose his own unique career since he would have inherited his father’s company. Thus he groomed to become a future sociopath. 

[thelastdianneosaur]

Here is an interesting article about the real John Nash and his battle with being diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. Although some of the scenes are fictionalized, I found it quite interesting the John has provided the STEM world with advancement in mathematics and related areas. Sadly he passed May 23rd of this year.

[thelastdianneosaur]

The character of John Nash is the ideal embodiment of the fine line between genius and insanity. For most of his life, his various eccentricities was linked to his genius and for the large part, was mostly ignored. Later in his life when, it became more apparent that he was having hallucinations  was when he was diagnosed to be a danger, not only to him self, but to his family and friends as well. What bothered me the most was that this story had a typical happy Hollywood ending and everything appeared dandy and well, such as “willing” his hallucination away and being ok without medication. Yet there were the realistic moments such as Alicia demonstrating frustration with being forced to be the caretaker and when John was drowning the baby knocking them both over that show that mental illness can be dangerous to those you love.

[thelastdianneosaur]

The character of Lisa was profound in the sense of invoking the idea of the “Bad Ass Bitch” the girl who oozes authority and gets what she wants. She practically ran the institution and was welcomed back by all when she was returned. She had many followers, mostly due to scaring them into friendship since you would want her on your side rather than being against her. When she and Susanna finally run away together, it can be seen that she finally starts to fall apart after realizing that Susanna left her rather than following her to Florida. This has been the only major act of disloyalty to Lisa, which most likely caused her to lash out against Susanna at the end. When Susanna finally confronts Lisa and yells out why she is still there, Lisa finally breaks down and sees that it her own fault for staying in the state she is in.

[thelastdianneosaur]

The idea of the splitting of Randle’s Personality from One Flew Over the Cuckoos Next into the personalities of Susanna and Lisa  was quite interesting in the sense of breaking apart the “good” characteristics into Susanna and the bad Characteristics into Lisa. For example, Susanna was always willing to help out the other patients and was kind to them, and acted as sister and did not want to leave them when she had the chance to escape. Lisa on the other hand, although she did act as the tough older sister, was generally admired by the other patients, more so as an act of fear to what she would do to them had the rebelled against her. Seeing the portrayal of nurse Valerie was quite refreshing to see in the sense that she act more as a mother figure to the girls rather than authoritarian as seen in Nurse Ratchet and the nurse in the Snake Pit who supposedly like Dr. Kik and the strictly loyal and in love nurse in the Bell Jar. Nurse Valerie acted as means of humanizing nurses and making them more personable. The integration of a female doctor as seen in Dr. Wick was also interesting in the sense that most doctors thus far have been male. She made doctors more personable rather than holding them to a high pedestal who does not have time to interact with their patients as well as demonstrating the idea of being approachable rather than being reserved for interaction with higher authorities.

[thelastdianneosaur]

Thoughts (11/5/15)

Reflecting upon your quote you posted on the whiteboard, with the correlation of young, high achieving students to mental illness later in life, I quite often see this in my family members, who all have various forms of artistic abilities and at a young age, they express that they want to go on and to college and study art, but do not posses the ability to do so since they do not have the grades for it. So more often than not, they turn to drugs and alcohol since they believe that they cannot perform to the best of their abilities.  I see this as a form of mental illness in the sense that it often hurts themselves as well as others around them and most do not seek help to fix themselves since they do not think of themselves worthy of redeeming themselves and feel like they have no self worth.

[thelastdianneosaur]

The Bell Jar, in many ways, correlates deeply with everyone, due to the point of view of how it is presented. Esther’s emotions articulate what she is going through, and are very relate-able to the point of it mirroring the same situations that we as college students feel today. Her metaphor of the fig tree is highly interesting, especially considering that we as Barrett students are often told to strive for all the opportunities that are available to us, yet we have too many to choose from and therefore cannot nurture one since we all want to pursue all of them. The entire situation of Buddy was also relate-able in the sense of arriving to college and assuming people are how they appear, yet finding out that they put on a facade to win people over and seeing who they really are. Esther’s treatments as well as her various doctors also symbolizes, in my opinion other people we meet in life, and are comparable professors. For example, Dr. Gordon represents the professors who pay little to no attention the actual needs of the students and preaches what they believe is true rather than what is useful for our futures. With this said, they are not too particular helpful in our college career and may even cause regression in education. On the other hand, there are professors such as Dr. Nolan , who embody the nurturing professors here at ASU and allow for the growth of a student as a whole. Looking at this variant cover, I feel as if it fully encapsulates what Esther was feeling, her positive buildup, including her childhood the peak/her break point and the ever declining mental stability. It also shows how she was captured within her own mind as well as being trapped how to proceed in her life.

[thelastdianneosaur]

Thoughts (10/29/15)

After reading Solanas’s S.C.U.M. Manifesto and reading excerpts from Rowe and Chavez’s paper, I found it interesting that Solanas did not directly categorize her sexual orientation, rather disagreeing with binaries but ultimately being labeled as a lesbian. What was intriguing was despite her disgust with men as well as her indifference to adhere to one sexual orientation, she was still a prostitute to have means of living, wholly contradicting her intentions. The article also raised the idea that being queer automatically mentally ill, not only it being unacceptable to the majority of society, but also the idea of it going hand in hand with other mental illnesses. Looking at other queer women of literature and media, such as Virginia Woolfe and Charlotte Mew who expressed her sexuality through writing, it is seen that there may be a correlation between queerness and madness, but it is not definite. Looking into what most queer women write about, which is usually breaking down the gender binaries, many people from the public take this is a challenge to the already established order, therefore categorizing it as insanity and mental illness, thus it is unfair to base the correlation off of this evidence.

[thelastdianneosaur]

I haven’t read the book yet, but judging from what my fellow classmates said, Chief Bromden was supposed to be the main character. His importance was still brought up towards the end of the movie where he realized through Randel that he should not be content with living a false life at the institution, yet should be out in the world living a real life. As a sign of his true friendship with Randel, he honor smothered him knowing that he was not the same person he was before the lobotomy and knew that is what he wanted. Although this may be a morbid scene, it shows that they had a true friendship, which each causing each other to realize to challenge their oppressors and to break free.

[thelastdianneosaur]

I took this scene as a depiction of what it felt like to have no control over your own thoughts or feelings. The systematic distribution of medication, the numbing music in the background, the automatic queue that forms, the total submission to take unknown pills, all of this resembling machines doing what they do, therefore eliminating the human aspect of the patient and making them machines to live and die in the ward.

[thelastdianneosaur]

To be honest, I thought her name was Nurse Ratchet. Lol :P Anyway, despite doing her efforts to “care” for her patients, I feel as if Nurse Ratched  took advantage of everyone around her, even the psychiatrists in the sense that they had full faith in her to perform her duties without supervision and even allowed for her to make executive decisions. Had they paid more attention to her manipulative personality, the ward would have been somewhat different, with the voluntary patients going home and focusing more on those who were actually contained. The idea of a female overseeing an all male ward was also interesting in the sense of taking away what is stereotypically seen as masculine and denying them their rights to do what men do. This could be an explanation of why they rebelled in the first place and did “manly” things during their rebellious phases. As noted in class, Nurse Ratched does indeed act as the “castrating female” yet in a more twisted way due to her actions resulting in physical, and emotional troubles.

[thelastdianneosaur]

[thelastdianneosaur]

This article from the NY Times published in 1967, describes the initial view of Titicut Follies and seems to be a bit tame in the sense of not outwardly expressing the opinions and outcry to remove the film as seen later after the release in the same year. This could probably be due to the film not being viewed by larger yet.

[thelastdianneosaur]

This scene and the scenes following this one in Titicut Follies, in my opinion, were the most memorable in the sense of the “shock content”. At first it reminded me of those conspiracy or found footage videos found on Youtube nowadays, so I wasn’t really thinking much of it. Then I remembered this was an actual human being who was subjected to this torment, and it hit me that he actually did die due to the poor conditions at Bridgewater. I then didn’t know how to feel throughout the rest of the film since I knew it was all real, yet it felt fake and staged.

[thelastdianneosaur]