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captainpoppleton
Reviews
Silence of the Hams (1992)
Ill conceived, funny moments.
Private investigator Rick Shaw must track down the evil Fu Manchu, who is doing something bad to the movie industry (though I couldn't exactly work out what ....)
It's as if the Somers Carroll production company was unexpectedly allocated time at Movie World & they thought - gosh, we'll just throw a script together using any random ideas we have had over the last 30 years, fly the cast & friends of Hey Hey up to Queensland, and whacko, we'll have an instant 40 minute movie (okay technically it's a 6 part serial).
There's a lot of strangeness in the storytelling technique; seems the director doesn't know that pantomime characters don't translate well to movies (well he knows NOW !)
Perhaps the first draft of the script was the only draft. Why is there a time machine ? There are many funny bits.
It's worth watching once, but you won't watch it twice.
If Terry Gilliam were given a $100 budget and 1 day, it's the kind of fun nonsense he might come up with.
The Marketing of Madness: Are We All Insane? (2010)
biased
A lot of people think that mental illness is not real. A broken bone can x-rayed & felt. Red blood cells can be counted. A tumour can be held in the hand. But mental illness has no such easy quantifiability. So depression & anxiety & attention deficit disorders can be easily brushed off as a lack of discipline, a lack of character, an excuse to get out of work. Normal emotional fluctuations being labelled as a medical condition.
Such people are going to love "The Marketing of Madness". The agenda is clear and uncompromising - mental illness is not a measurable or proved phenomena, therefore the drug industry is peddling dangerous pills that do not treat anything.
The very term "mental illness" doesn't help. The word "mental" implies that the condition is within the conscious control of the sufferer, i.e. they are choosing to be ill, or pretending to be ill. We don't call a concussion a mental illness, yet a concussion involves the brain & has no higher claim on reality than a serotonin or dopamine imbalance. It's just that a concussion is more measurable and observable, a bit like the moon being more measurable & observable than the Milky Way's black hole. The existence of black holes must be inferred as they cannot be seen directly.
The observance & diagnoses of mental illness should be considered in the same spirit. The physical & neurological tests for headaches are broad & only generally indicative (eg fatigue, nausea, dizziness, high blood pressure) but does that mean headaches don't exist ?
This "documentary" utilises the same information deception techniques that it purports to expose. It does not give both sides of the story. Not one person is shown expressing satisfaction with even one drug. Statistics given by the program are questionable - the interviewees seem to be making them up as they go along. The study linking psychotropic drugs to car crashes is not named, yet its numbers are presented as factual. The credibility of the interviewees should also be regarded as suspicious. Much screen time is given to a chap who has reached the dizzy heights of "registered nurse". How this makes him qualified to analyse the behaviour of pharmaceutical companies over the last 70 years is a bit of a mystery. Other interviewees include a chemist, a family physician, a lawyer, not one but two naturopaths (!) and not one but two journalists. Whistleblower psychiatrists were nowhere to be found. Wow, what a line up; Glaxo-Smith-Kline & Roche must be quaking .....
The program gleefully rakes the history of psychiatry over the coals. No one denies that 80 years ago, inappropriate drugs were prescribed to those experiencing severe mental illness. Of course it could be argued that opium, cocaine, heroin and Thorazine were the best options available at the time, but you won't hear any expert on this show giving any benefit of any doubt. The thinking seems to be that if psychiatry was incompetent and borderline fraudulent in 1930, then the same holds true in the 21st century. It repeatedly insults psychiatrists, implying that they are not real doctors and have only reached such a status in the minds of the public by heavy marketing.
Very generously, it is admitted that psychological, emotional and "mental distress" conditions do exist but doctors worldwide and the public worldwide have been "fooled" by the drug companies into thinking that such conditions are in fact medical conditions and may benefit from drugs. The tone of the whole program is "not proved, not proved", but this is a long, long way from "we have disproved".
Despite relentless attack, the script never actually has the courage to draw a line in the sand & state, "Valium does not work. Prozac does not work." The program NEVER cites any studies that indicate such drugs do NOT work. Instead we get scorn heaped upon half-baked sanity experiments done 50 years ago. We also get an anti-capitalist argument, that drug companies make loads of money, therefore they are evil. Patents expire, new drugs are marketed, therefore they are evil. This is the documentary's message that I didn't really understand - they make loads of money therefore mental illness doesn't exist ?
So is there anything good at all about this program ? Without relinquishing its determination to be biased & ignore all opposing points of view, it scores big points when attacking the many editions of the DSM, especially the non-scientific & perhaps even haphazard methodology of its authors. Another successful attack is launched at drug trials and their lack of independence. Conflict of interest has never been a secret in the drug industry, and this doco makes sure you know all about it.
Of course the drug industry pays for research and trials. Who the hell else is going to ? It's a bit like saying the car industry is sinister because it researches new engines and does safety tests. Again, who the hell else is going to do it ? If it were left up to the government to commission and pay for truly independent research, not a whole lot would get done, and it could be argued that the end results would not necessarily be any safer.
The program's attack on Teenscreen actually trips itself up monumentally. A stream of numbers & faces condemning mass screening for depression as a huge generator of false positives, then lets it slip that teen suicide is on the decline. Well just maybe mass screening is saving & improving lives. Maybe the teen demographic was colossally under-diagnosed in the 20th century.
The whole mental illness thing is an imprecise science, but it's all real.