Media and Madness

Why am I blogging on a Saturday night? Because I am pre-production for a 2-week shoot and I'm having all sorts of issues. I'll be lucky to get a reasonable amount of sleep for the next 2 weeks.

One of my issues right now is getting permission from a conference director about videotaping an event for my film. I get the feeling that these people have not ever dealt with the media before because they do not seem to understand that I have to get informed consent from all of the attendees in addition to location releases.

Having worked with competent public relations professionals before, I am always surprised by the ineptitude of many people I've encountered in the mental health world in dealing with media professionals. I guess it's because these mental health non-profits do not have a PR department and their staff are not trained in PR. They definitely didn't study public relations because if they did, they would be courteous, professional and communicative, understand the long-term consequences of positive portrayals of people with mental illnesses and understand how such media coverage benefits their overall mission.

I am convinced that there exists some kind of symbiotic link between the mental health organizations' inability to work with media professionals and the lack of positive depictions of people with mental illnesses in the media. There are very few, if any regular positive in-depth and balanced portrayals of people with serious mental illnesses on TV. It seems that opportunities like my film to portray people with mental illnesses positively are often subverted on a regular basis by mental health leaders like Dr. Shaye Baker, who appear to have no clue about the social impact of media on popular culture. That is one of the reasons I decided to write about her in my blog. Being the target of media coverage may help her to understand how it affects people's behaviors and perceptions when people read this and form an opinion about her.

Good public relations people are savvy, responsive and are more than happy to help get the ball rolling. It is never an uphill battle working with them; they welcome and savor good publicity. It's always the corporate world public relations departments that are competent and savvy. They are so savvy that they will sometimes even disregard the truth and promote a false positive image of their product. I guess that's why the pharmaceutical companies are rich and successful in branding their products, though they may have terrible side effects, and people with mental illnesses are branded with the stigma and the penchant toward violence even though there is little basis in reality for that. The majority of people with mental illnesses are harmless and sometimes are often so vulnerable that they are in need of protection from the rest of society. Mental health professionals understand this truth, but probably work toward promoting positive truthful images of mental illness in the mass media. This is why the intersection between the media and madness is kind of screwed up.