When You Cannot Speak About the Thing That Most Pains You

I visited my grandfather's grave recently for the first time since his death in 2001. One of the reasons I (and my siblings) had a such a hard time visiting him was because of the pain I feel when I recall how he had to live the last 10-15 years of his life and when I recall the way my family dealt with his mental illness. They didn't deal with it; they rarely talked or acknowledged the fact that my step grandfather was "crazy" and had fixed delusions about the CIA spying on him. The blanket of denial and shame enveloped our family and was palpable and omnipresent. It is also in remembering that I was not there to help and support him in his illness. After my grandmother divorced him, she left him with a little money, but without a caretaker. With the severity of his psychosis, he was not unable to take care of himself. Because neither my grandmother or mother did not care to educate themselves about mental illness, they knew little about his condition in medical terms and basically abandoned him. I found their actions to be unconscionable, but they did not feel any guilt just leaving him to fend for himself. No wonder just a few years after my grandmother and he split (after 22 years of cohabitation and marriage), my grandfather ended up in a public home for the mentally ill in Richmond, VA.
As I work relentlessly on this film without pay, I sometimes find myself wondering why I am willing to endure the many sleepless nights and long 14-hour days. I realize that a part of my tolerance of this lifestyle is because I am determined to process all the emotions I withheld as well as produce this film. The research, pre-production, meeting all these mental health professionals from all over the country, speaking to Asian Americans with mental illnesses and hearing their stories and speaking about my personal experiences as a family member of a consumer have been paving my healing path. Finally after 30 some years of not acknowledging that I had a family member with a mental illness, I have permission to talk about it. These opportunities to speak to Asian Americans with mental illnesses and their family members are unprecedented for me. I wanted to know how their families dealt with this pain. Empathy is a healer and I had longed for those emotional connections to other Asian Americans who had experienced the silent suffering and the kind of spiritual paralysis that comes from denying portions of your daily reality. I needed the validation from other souls who lived in the same culture that I did; Euro-Americans could not understand the underbelly of mental illness as it is exists in Korean culture. I realize that though on the surface, it seems that I am doing this film for humanitarian reasons, which is true, but I am also doing this film for my own process. I went through most of my life, not being able to talk about the issue that most pained me in my early childhood and most of my adulthood.

While my friends and colleagues might talk about cancer and heart disease among their family members, I was not allowed to speak about a close relative's chronic and serious ordeal with chronic paranoid schizophrenia. How do you go about distilling grief into something that might benefit society? Art.

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.

That [Expletive] Conficker Worm!

This afternoon I discovered that my DVD burning software would not launch, though it did 2 days ago, probably due to the installation of the Microsoft OS updates. Last night, I spent 4 freaking hours installing Microsoft updates on my 2 computers and then had to run several scans to make sure that my main editing computer wasn't going to be destroyed or something. Two days ago I tested my DVD burning software, Roxio and burned a DVD of the rough cut that Linda and I had compiled. I spent the last 2 days cleaning up the cut and putting in subtitles for Mr. Truong. With only 2 hours before the close of the foundation's office doors, I could not burn to DVD the latest rough cut with the subtitles. So I had to submit the DVD with the rough cut from 2 days ago. Do you have any idea how much that sucked? After all this work, I had to submit a half-baked rough cut to a foundation that expressed a lot of interest in our work. Oh well. Sometimes, it just happens that way. I won't sulk over it. Oh, maybe I will for just a little while... at least until tomorrow afternoon.

I just submitted another grant application to another foundation today. I barely made it in time because of the stupid Conficker worm that was supposed to strike today, but didn't. I backed up my Avid project files, but I was not able to back up all of the Avid OMFIs, which are digitized tapes, anywhere because I do not have that many terabyte drives. Naturally, at a large company, the IT department would handle these kinds of crisis preparations, but my little one-woman production company does not have an IT department. Just little ole me. Luckily, I do know a thing or two and was smart enough to run multiple scans to make sure that my 3 years of work wasn't going to be destroyed in a millisecond by some [Expletive] worm. So with my grant application due today, I was cramming as much as I could into the few hours I had.