I've been watching a period television show (The Knick!) that deals a little with mental illness in one of its side characters. I love period shows in general for the anachronisms. I think it's so easy to assume that whatever we are up to as a society is the best there is to offer (one of my favorite cheesy songs is Everything's Up to Date in Kansas City), but who knows what thing we do now is going to cause future generations to cringe at us for being idiots.
The Knick is often cringe worthy with the old fashioned medicine, depiction of race or gender relations, public shaming, slanted morality, etc. But the episode dealing with the character suffering from mental illness reminded me of one of my favorite SNL skits, "Rick's Model T's", in which Crazy Rick sells used cars with his actually crazy wife: "Don't make me put you back in the attic. . . . Damn it Daisy, I wish I had a more legitimate treatment option other than the attic, but that's just where medicine is at." I have a personal belief that we'll think of our current treatment of sociopaths as the rough equivalent of putting people up in the attic. I know others think that this is the best we can do as a society for sociopaths (or that sociopaths should have it worse than they do?), but I don't know, I still cringe at it.
Somewhat relatedly, I like the opening scenes of A Private Universe, in which Harvard graduates and professors confidently explain the changes of seasons all wrong.
I've tried to recreate this scene a little bit, but millennials in particular all give the right basic answer. They seem surprised that anyone ever thought that the closeness of the Earth to the sun could possibly explain the seasons (why is winter in the northern hemisphere summer for the southern then?). But it's of course not interesting to me so much about what people do or do not know, but whether they are able to recognize what they do and do not know -- how open is their mind, how good is their self-awareness, how humble is their sense of fallibility?
The Knick is often cringe worthy with the old fashioned medicine, depiction of race or gender relations, public shaming, slanted morality, etc. But the episode dealing with the character suffering from mental illness reminded me of one of my favorite SNL skits, "Rick's Model T's", in which Crazy Rick sells used cars with his actually crazy wife: "Don't make me put you back in the attic. . . . Damn it Daisy, I wish I had a more legitimate treatment option other than the attic, but that's just where medicine is at." I have a personal belief that we'll think of our current treatment of sociopaths as the rough equivalent of putting people up in the attic. I know others think that this is the best we can do as a society for sociopaths (or that sociopaths should have it worse than they do?), but I don't know, I still cringe at it.
Somewhat relatedly, I like the opening scenes of A Private Universe, in which Harvard graduates and professors confidently explain the changes of seasons all wrong.
I've tried to recreate this scene a little bit, but millennials in particular all give the right basic answer. They seem surprised that anyone ever thought that the closeness of the Earth to the sun could possibly explain the seasons (why is winter in the northern hemisphere summer for the southern then?). But it's of course not interesting to me so much about what people do or do not know, but whether they are able to recognize what they do and do not know -- how open is their mind, how good is their self-awareness, how humble is their sense of fallibility?