My Rant and Rave — My Life as a Filmmaker

When Good Things Happen to Good People in the Film World, I'm Surprised --Short Documentary Film 2010 Academy Award Nomination

2010-03-06T23:25:00.016-05:00

One of the first things I learned as a budding filmmaker is that filmmaking is not a meritocracy. Like many industries, you move up the film world through who you know, not what you know. Pseudo-artists make it big while real artists starve. Some of the best works of art do not necessarily garner the most accolades; some of the weirdest, most violent and gratituously sexually explicit independent films, in the name of art, often win many awards at both Cannes and the Independent Spirit Awards. Some films which I feel are so extraordinary don't quite make it commercially while others which I would personally consider to be less worthy go on to become blockbuster hits. The world of film has its particular tastes and trends, which often go against my personal aesthetics and tastes. But who cares what I think? I am a nobody in the film world. But yet as a voting member of the Independent Spirit Awards, I find many of the films to be too violent and gratituously sexual and sometimes a combination of both. "Sin Nombre," by a half Japanese and half Swedish American Cary Funakaga, while a beautifully artistic film, had multiple scenes of attempted rapes and children committing acts of violence. An 11-year-old kid shoots a man and the corpse is cut up into pieces and fed to the dogs. So often I find so many bizarre, disturbing and distasteful films being nominated for top awards. "Sin Nombre" was a piece of art and also is probably one of the first American films which provides historical insight into the Central American/Mexican immigrant experience. According to published reports, Funakaga researched his story meticulously. But did it have to be so violent? Was that violence germane to the expression of story? I think some of it was; I think some of it was sensationalism. In many ways, I think it was a masterful, multi-faceted visual storytelling but I do not think it had to be so violent. So many of the nominated Independent Spirit Award films are violent. Last year's "Hunger" and "Gomorrah" made me numb.

What does this have to do anything with the Academy Awards? Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert who are among the humblest and kindest among our species have been nominated for their short documentary film "The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant." Their sensitive, intimate portrayal of GM workers losing their jobs and community as the last truck rolls off the assembly lines brought me to tears. It is about the impact of the recession on ordinary, working-class folks who want nothing more than to raise their family. I saw portions of the film at the IFP Market and met Steven there for the first time in person though I have been corresponding with him for the past 5 years.

Speaking of Oscar-worthy films, the Ohio-based documentary filmmaking couple Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert who helped me to find production crew in Dayton have been nominated for an Oscar this year for their short doc, "The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant." They are among the kindest and humblest of our species, in addition to being among the finest docmakers around. So happy for them. And moreover, I am thrilled that good films and great humane filmmakers without giant egos get the spotlight and recognition that they deserve. I could not be happier with their nomination. As my Associate Producer Karen said "That's great. Isn't it nice when good things happen to good people? Especially in an industry where, at least in my experience, people often fail upward, or are rewarded merely for whom they know..." She worked in film for a decade before she had kids.

Steven Bognar helped me from the very beginning in 2005 when I first began shooting my film in Ohio. He didn't even know a single thing about me. I just called him up and without hesitation he assisted. He helped me to find a cameraperson who was willing to work at student rates the last time I was in Ohio in April 2009. During that same videoshoot, when 2 out of my 3 batteries went dead all of the sudden and I was unable to find a professional videostore in Dayton, Steve saved the day by calling up several of his filmmaker friends in the Dayton, OH and asked them to help me. I'm in awe of their generosity as much as I am of their achievements in filmmaking. Anyways, just found out that they were nominated last night and can't stop raving about them. Usually, I am complaining that such and such film got nominated when another should have been. There is meritocracy in the film world after all. Yeah!

Prejudices Against People Who Speak English as a Second Language

2009-12-31T21:59:00.001-05:00

Several years ago, we submitted a trailer of our film to a well-known Asian American Film funder, whose name I will not mention here. And our grant application was rejected and I requested a reviews by the judges. One of them said that it was clear that Mr. Truong, Can's father, did not speak English as his first language and that I should have gotten him a translator. This statement was rather offensive to me and made me wonder how an Asian American organization could have allowed that judge to be critiquing films. Firstly, the fact that a language is not a person's first does not necessarily mean that he/she cannot be fluent or speak the language proficiently. Many Asian Americans speak one or more languages well without an accent; many people around the world are multi-lingual. In fact, in some countries around the world, it is natural to learn several languages. In Holland, most speak English, in addition to Dutch. In several African countries, there are over 200 languages, many of them are indigenous and are spoken by a small percentage of the population. Such insensitivities should not be perpetrated by an Asian American organization. They should know better having lived at the confluence of more than one linguistic world.

English isn't my first language, but I speak it better than most. This is one of the ways in the majority of Americans, many of whom are monolingual take barbs at Asian Americans who speak a multitude of languages. Furthermore, an accent is not indicative of ignorance or an inability to speak the language. I must preface this statement with the disclaimer that individuals have variable levels of linguistic ability and highly different ways of expressing themselves. Some people can learn to speak many languages proficiently, just like some people can learn to excel at playing several instruments or play a variety of different sports.

Poor Children Likelier to Get Antipsychotics

2009-12-31T21:21:00.001-05:00

In some of my previous blog entries, I mentioned the increased diagnoses of mental illnesses among children and the increased use of powerful psychiatric drugs -- many of which haven't yet been tested for children -- trends likely to have long-term physiological and psychological effects on an entire generation of children. It is disturbing trend and I hope that the undue influence of pharmaceutical companies comes to a halt.

By DUFF WILSON
Published: December 11, 2009
New federally financed drug research reveals a stark disparity: children covered by Medicaid are given powerful antipsychotic medicines at a rate four times higher than children whose parents have private insurance. And the Medicaid children are more likely to receive the drugs for less severe conditions than their middle-class counterparts, the data shows.

Those findings, by a team from Rutgers and Columbia, are almost certain to add fuel to a long-running debate. Do too many children from poor families receive powerful psychiatric drugs not because they actually need them — but because it is deemed the most efficient and cost-effective way to control problems that may be handled much differently for middle-class children?

The questions go beyond the psychological impact on Medicaid children, serious as that may be. Antipsychotic drugs can also have severe physical side effects, causing drastic weight gain and metabolic changes resulting in lifelong physical problems.

On Tuesday, a pediatric advisory committee to the Food and Drug Administration met to discuss the health risks for all children who take antipsychotics. The panel will consider recommending new label warnings for the drugs, which are now used by hundreds of thousands of people under age 18 in this country, counting both Medicaid patients and those with private insurance.

Meanwhile, a group of Medicaid medical directors from 16 states, under a project they call Too Many, Too Much, Too Young, has been experimenting with ways to reduce prescriptions of antipsychotic drugs among Medicaid children.

They plan to publish a report early next year.

The Rutgers-Columbia study will also be published early next year, in the peer-reviewed journal Health Affairs. But the findings have already been posted on the Web, setting off discussion among experts who treat and study troubled young people.

Some experts say they are stunned by the disparity in prescribing patterns. But others say it reinforces previous indications, and their own experience, that children with diagnoses of mental or emotional problems in low-income families are more likely to be given drugs than receive family counseling or psychotherapy.

Part of the reason is insurance reimbursements, as Medicaid often pays much less for counseling and therapy than private insurers do. Part of it may have to do with the challenges that families in poverty may have in consistently attending counseling or therapy sessions, even when such help is available.

“It’s easier for patients, and it’s easier for docs,” said Dr. Derek H. Suite, a psychiatrist in the Bronx whose pediatric cases include children and adolescents covered by Medicaid and who sometimes prescribes antipsychotics. “But the question is, ‘What are you prescribing it for?’ That’s where it gets a little fuzzy.”

Too often, Dr. Suite said, he sees young Medicaid patients to whom other doctors have given antipsychotics that the patients do not seem to need. Recently, for example, he met with a 15-year-old girl. She had stopped taking the antipsychotic medication that had been prescribed for her after a single examination, paid for by Medicaid, at a clinic where she received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder.

Why did she stop? Dr. Suite asked. “I can control my moods,” the girl said softly.

After evaluating her, Dr. Suite decided she was right. The girl had arguments with her mother and stepfather and some insomnia. But she was a good student and certainly not bipolar, in Dr. Suite’s opinion.

“Normal teenager,” Dr. Suite said, nodding. “No scrips for you.”

Because there can be long waits to see the psychiatrists accepting Medicaid, it is often a pediatrician or family doctor who prescribes an antipsychotic to a Medicaid patient — whether because the parent wants it or the doctor believes there are few other options.

Some experts even say Medicaid may provide better care for children than many covered by private insurance because the drugs — which can cost $400 a month — are provided free to patients, and families do not have to worry about the co-payments and other insurance restrictions.

“Maybe Medicaid kids are getting better treatment,” said Dr. Gabrielle Carlson, a child psychiatrist and professor at the Stony Brook School of Medicine. “If it helps keep them in school, maybe it’s not so bad.”

In any case, as Congress works on health care legislation that could expand the nation’s Medicaid rolls by 15 million people — a 43 percent increase — the scope of the antipsychotics problem, and the expense, could grow in coming years.

Even though the drugs are typically cheaper than long-term therapy, they are the single biggest drug expenditure for Medicaid, costing the program $7.9 billion in 2006, the most recent year for which the data is available.

The Rutgers-Columbia research, based on millions of Medicaid and private insurance claims, is the most extensive analysis of its type yet on children’s antipsychotic drug use. It examined records for children in seven big states — including New York, Texas and California — selected to be representative of the nation’s Medicaid population, for the years 2001 and 2004.

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This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 31, 2009
An article on Dec. 12 about a higher rate of antipsychotic drug prescriptions for children on Medicaid than for children whose parents have private insurance, using information from a Food and Drug Administration analyst, gave an incorrect estimate of the number of people in the United States under the age of 18 who use such drugs. An F.D.A. official who made the estimate of 300,000 at a public meeting on Dec. 8 subsequently said she intended for that the number to apply to one leading drug. There is no authoritative or official count of youths under 18 using antipsychotic drugs, but it is believed to be much higher than 300,000.

Among Asian Americans, Many Subgroups Lack Adequate Health Coverage

2009-10-13T12:07:00.000-04:00

This article from Asiaweek underscores the disservice that the model minority myth does to Asian Americans.

January 28, 2009

Asian Americans are often seen as the model minority, with higher rates of education, income, and employment. But this perception might be overshadowing the problems of lack of health insurance coverage among the Asian American community.
In a January 2007 study by Kaiser Family Foundation called “Key Facts: Race, Ethnicity, and Medical Care,” Asian Americans, when compared to other minority groups, had relatively high rates of health coverage. Of the white, non-Hispanic population, 13 percent were uninsured, with Asian Americans falling not far behind, with 19 percent uninsured. In contrast, 34 percent of Hispanics, 32 percent of Native Americans and Alaska Natives, and 21 percent of African Americans were uninsured. Comparatively, Asian Americans were the best-performing minority group in terms of health coverage.
But when separated into different ethnicities, the data for health insurance coverage for Asian Americans becomes shocking, with many subgroups having high rates of uninsured people.
“When we aggregate the data and look at it all together, they do perform better than all other ethnic groups, but when we disaggregate them, we find that lumping Asian Americans together really does mask a lot of problems,” said Cara James, senior policy analyst for Kaiser Family Foundation, who led a study released April 2008 that examined health coverage among Asian Pacific Islanders.
The study found large variations among the Asian American population: Employer-sponsored coverage was as high as 77 percent for Asian Indians, but as low as 49 percent for Koreans. In general, Indians and Japanese had the highest rates of coverage, with just 12 percent of their populations uninsured.
Filipinos followed with 14 percent uninsured, Chinese with 16 percent, other South Asians with 20 percent, Vietnamese with 21 percent, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders with 24 percent, and Koreans, with the highest rate of uninsured, at 31 percent.
James attributed the high rate of uninsured among Koreans to their tendency to work in small businesses which can’t afford employee health insurance. “Koreans tend to work for smaller employers, which partly explains higher rates of uninsured, contrasted to the perception that Koreans tend to be not poor, so though they have high incomes, they have lower rates of insurance,” she said.
The Kaiser Family Foundation study found that 60 percent of nonelderly adult Korean workers are employed at companies with 100 employees or less, compared to less than 40 percent for other Asian and Pacific Islander groups.
One of the major issues uncovered by the study was the effect of grouping Pacific Islanders and Native Hawaiians with Asians: the low rates of health coverage among Pacific Islanders are masked by the influence of the larger populations like Chinese and Filipinos.
Deeana Jang, policy director of Asian and Pacific Islander American Health Forum, who helped with the study, said, “We shouldn’t lump all Asian Americans together. The Pacific Islander number is such small number, it’s really meaningless. We need to separate it out.”
James agreed, especially considering the large disparities in coverage between Asians and Pacific Islanders.
“We tend to talk about Asian Americans collectively, but Native Hawaiians have rates compared to some of the worst-performing minority groups,” James said.
James correlated the rates of health coverage to income, saying that Indians had the highest rate of coverage because they are least likely to be poor, meaning their incomes are well above the federal poverty line. Meanwhile, she pointed out that 43 percent of Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders are near poor.
Gem Daus, a Filipino American studies and Asian American sexuality professor at the University of Maryland, who formerly worked with APIAHF, agreed that income is a major factor in getting coverage.
“It’s expensive, and it’s hard to get, especially when you’re not making a lot of money,” he said.
But even beyond issues of low income, are language barriers, which make it difficult for those who don’t speak English well to navigate a health system that is already complicated.
“It’s confusing enough in English,” Daus said.
One unique program in Montgomery County, Maryland is trying to remedy this.
Called the Asian American Health Initiative, the program was established in 2005 to meet the health needs of Asian Americans in the county, which comprise 13.5 percent of the Montgomery County population. The program aims to expand health services available to Asian Americans, outreach to different ethnic groups about the availability of health care, and eliminate barriers for those in the Asian American community to accessing health care. It specifically targets seniors and recent immigrants who are often isolated.
“Asian Americans have the highest linguistic isolation compared to other groups, even Hispanics,” said Julie Bawa, AAHI’s program director.
Often, language barriers can prevent immigrants from seeking health care or understanding how to obtain health insurance. To fix this problem, AAHI has a program called the Patient Navigator Program.
The program identifies health resources for Asian Americans in Montgomery County and helps navigate the health care system for people who otherwise would have been limited by lack of English skills, uninsured or underinsured status, or socioeconomic status. Information specialists speak Hindi, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Korean, languages spoken by 70 percent of the county’s Asian American population. For those who need other languages, language lines are used to translate.
Bawa said that the top question asked is “How do I get insurance?” Questions also range from how to apply for Medicare and Medicaid to simple requests for help filling out forms, showing a gap between the availability of health coverage and general understanding in how to obtain it.
“There needs to be more awareness in general, as well as more effort in having materials in different languages,” Bawa said.
But even beyond language barriers are obstacles for recent immigrants, who must wait five years after arriving in the U.S. to be eligible for public health programs.
“Because Asian Americans are largely an immigrant population, there are still some barriers for immigrants to access public health coverage,” Jang said.
Immigrants also face the problem of conflicting priorities: whether to get health coverage or deal with more immediate needs like finding jobs and providing for the family, said Bawa.
There is also the issue of cultural barriers. Findings from the Commonwealth Fund’s 2001 Health Care Quality Survey found that Asian Americans, as compared to other groups, were “the least likely to feel that their doctor understands their background and values, to have confidence in their doctor, and to be as involved in decision-making as they would like to be.”
Only 56 percent of Asian Americans said they felt involved in decision-making, compared to 78 percent of whites. Only 48 percent reported they felt their doctor understood their background and values, compared to the highest rate of 61 percent for Hispanics.
Jang said she thinks this could be prevented if doctors took the time to find out more about their patients. “In order to have high quality care, you have to be patient-sensitive, you don’t treat patients same. You need to find out about their lives, and ask the right questions,” she said.
Interestingly, the Kaiser Family Foundation study found that Asian Americans who were 3^rd plus generation Americans were the most likely to have health insurance, compared to other subgroups, with just 11 percent uninsured.
However, James attributes this not to cultural values, but to the fact that families in the U.S. longer tend to have higher education, income, and jobs, which she says all affect take-up of coverage.
Jang agreed, especially based on her own experience. “My grandma was a garment worker. She didn’t have health coverage. I’m an attorney. So the longer people are here, the next generation gets better jobs that are more likely to provide coverage.”
Still, high un-insurance rates remain a problem, especially in light of Asian Americans’ high susceptibility to cancer and Hepatitis B.
Those without health insurance tend to not seek health care, missing out on preventative screenings for things like cancer. This is especially important because cancer is the leading cause of death for Asian Americans, according to data from 2003 from the National Center of Health Statistics. But for Hispanics, African Americans, and whites, heart disease is the leading cause of death.
Jang said she believes this abnormal trend is due to the fact that Asian Americans are less likely to be screened for cancer, allowing the problem to worsen over time and only be caught later on.
The solution to improving health insurance rates still has yet to be found. Daus believes that universal health care coverage should be expanded, while making sure to outreach to specific communities. Jang believes that more patient navigators should be provided to help Asian Americans who would otherwise be lost trying to understand a complicated system.
But one thing remains clear, despite perceptions of Asian Americans being a model minority, health coverage and access to care are major problems in the community. Access to health insurance needs to be made easier, Daus said.
He said, “Health insurance is a safety net for the future, but if you have more immediate needs and it’s not easy to get, it’s easy to ignore.”

Recovering from a Home Burglary

2009-09-27T01:13:00.039-04:00

I live in an ungentrified, densely-populated, urban neighborhood; some snobby upper-middle people might even call my neighborhood a ghetto. For me, it's where I've always wanted to live: an undeveloped neighborhood where class wasn't an issue. I had previously envied those who moved into Soho when it was rows of slaughter houses and Williamsburg when there was gang violence on the streets. Within many artist sub-cultures in NYC, to live in an ungentrified urban development was a mark of honor and courage among artists/activists like myself. It's one thing to say that you're not bourgeois, but to live among the more disenfranchised is another.
As an artist/activist whose heroines and heroes have always been the likes of Yuri Kochiyama, Grace Lee Boggs, Maya Angelou, and Malcolm X, I have always known in my heart that I had to live in a neighborhood like one that I do. I have dedicated my life to fighting classism, racism, sexism, and now ableism, (which is discrimination against people with disabilities). It is easy to fight classism from afar, from an ivory tower or from an upper-middle to middle class neighborhoods where I have lived most of my life. Many intellectuals can talk the talk, but cannot walk the walk. So here I am. I am a product of privilege in certain ways; I spent my last years of high school in an upper-middle class neighborhood, contemplating Kant and Plato which led to my liberal enlightenment. Contemplating Kant, despite their being dead white men with Euro-centric views of the universe, can instill a great sense of duty and social responsibility. If there is any one thing responsible for my poverty, it is my liberal education that has propelled my quest for social justice in mental health among many other social issues. I am imbued with upper-middle class liberal tastes. However, with some of the issues in my family, I was in certain ways deprived of things I can't quite say in this blog.

I wanted to move into this neighborhoods, where there are drug dealers and not-so-kind people on the streets. I chose this despite all my other choices so I should not lament. But lately, I have questioning my decision to buy my condo in this neighborhood and here's why:

Lately, my neighborhood has been under siege, making national headlines with a brutal shooting of 5 cops and a story that reads like a script out of an episode of Law and Order. In pursuit of the criminals, the police deployed the SWAT Team and a police helicopter, which hovered directly over our building at 5:30am in the morning on July 16, 2009. The sound of it was so surreal, had someone told me that it was UFO landing on top of our building I would likely have believed them. I literally woke up believing that I had dreamt the strange loud noise and fell immediately back to sleep. This happened less than 2 blocks from my home on July 16, 2009: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/17/nyregion/17jersey.html?scp=1&sq=reed%20street%20jersey%20city&st=cse

One month later, my home was burglarized while I was asleep. It's been crazy ever since. I have to finish writing this later, but I think I have to go to sleep. But below are the events that happened.

I woke up around noon on August 11, 2009 to find the window fan in one of the 2 windows in my office removed and placed in a chair next to the window. One of the last things I had done prior to going to bed at 3 am was turn off the window fan so I was immediately alarmed and knew that this was an indication that something was seriously wrong. I walked into my dining and living room area and discovered that my 2 laptops and digital camera were gone. My immediate impulse was to knock on some of the doors on my floor to ask if anyone had seen or heard anything, but I could not find my bag, which contained my house keys. I walked throughout my home, searching in the usual places I stored my bag, but it was nowhere to be found. I frantically continued to search for my bag, which also contained my cellphone, wallet, cash and credit cards, in disbelief. I then called the police, my sister and Vanessa, the superintendent of our building. I began to search my apartment for other missing items and clues while still in a mild state of shock and disbelief. At approximately 12:20pm, Officer Howlett came and took my police report.
My apartment is on the 5^th floor and the window, which appeared to be the point of entry, is not on a fire escape so the point of entry being that window seemed very implausible. But it did certainly appear that way. I wondered if the perpetrator might have entered through the roof and somehow accessed the window via the roof so I asked Officer Howlett if we should perhaps investigate the roof. I asked him to please take a look at the roof, which is only accessible by key. The door to the roof, if not opened with a key, sounds siren so I cleared roof access with Vanessa. I also asked her if there was anyone else who had roof keys and she said no. The officer and I went on the roof and found nothing unusual. The only things I noticed in the roof area directly above the window, were DirectTV Satellite Dishes installed. The officer said this was not significant in any way. He seemed skeptical that the window was the point of entry for the burglar to enter my apartment. The window was not adjacent to any other structures that could have given the burglar access to this window at such a dangerous height of 5 flights. He asked me if anyone had keys to my apartment and if my door had been open when I discovered the burglary. I told him that only my superintendent had the keys and that the door was slightly ajar when I first discovered the burglary as if the intruder left using my front door. He asked me questions that seemed to imply that it was possible that the perpetrator somehow used the front door as access and set up the scene to appear as if the window was used to as the point of entry. To this day, I do not have any solid evidence to establish the exact point of entry.
Later that evening when a neighbor, Ben, came over to help me replace the lock to my door, he noticed a large palm print on the outside ledge of the window. So I called the police again to request that they come and take the prints as evidence. Officers Bravo and Montanez came, looked at the palm print and said that the surface of the ledge was not a good surface to take fingerprints from and that the likelihood of such evidence being admissible in court was slim. I think if I recall correctly they also said that palm prints are not taken for criminal records, only fingerprints are taken for arrested individuals.

Fast forward to my return from Arizona on Sept 17. On Sept 18, there was another burglary in my building. Scary as shit and everyone is on the edge.

Workshop/Screening in Phoenix and Amazing Sedona

2009-09-19T01:09:00.020-04:00

I got some good news yesterday. Michael Isip, Vice Pres of TV Content, KQED, the public TV network in San Francisco, said he really liked our most recent 61 min rough cut. His high opinion of our cut makes it much more likely that our final cut will be broadcast on PBS.

Sept 10 - I gave the first workshop "Deconstructing the Asian American Model Minority Myth" with Hyung Chol Yoo, PhD, a professor of psychology of Arizona State University at the 2009 National Assoc. of Rights Protection and Advocacy annual conference at the Pointe Hilton Squaw Peak (an amazingly beautiful hotel). For more info, you can read my blog about this workshop. But I'm not done writing about it yet:(http://www.amongourkin.org/2009/09/deconstructing-model-minority-myth.html)

As always, I meet some of the most interesting people at these conferences like Ron Bassman (ronaldbassman.com). A psychologist, he was once told that he was a chronic schizophrenic with little hope of recovery and would have to be on medications for the rest of his life. At one point, he was in insulin-induced coma, administered electroconvulsive therapy (shock therapy) and a host of other "treatments" which ultimately harmed him in many ways. Institutionalization and forced treatment were common practices in the 1960's for people with mental illnesses. People with mental illnesses were viewed as having no rights. He defied all norms by becoming a PhD. recovering from an "incurable" mental illness and recently wrote a book "A Fight to Be." I highly recommend that you check his website: ronaldbassman.com out.

This Pointe Hilton Hotel was absolutely gorgeous with a water park, consisting of 8 pools. I tubed down this "river pool" and went slithering down this very long water slide 3x. I think I was the only person over the age of 12 having so much fun. (It's 105 degrees in Phoenix so you need to swim)

Sept 10 - The screening of my 61 min rough cut at the Arizona Public Health Assoc. Conference went ok. I thought it was charming that they served popcorn during the film. The turnouts were far lower than expected, but we got good film evaluations at the public health conference. Less than half of the number of people expected attended the conference. The recession apparently has affected travel budgets for public health administrations. Even less than that number attended my screening.

The audience was mostly MDs, PhDs, MPHs, nurses and other health service providers. I thought they as medical professionals would have negative comments about some of the anti-psychotropic medication opinions expressed by consumers in my film, but none of them mentioned that in their written evaluations. A few said that the film was powerful and amazing. Two women stayed after the screening and talked to me in depth about the social importance of the film. One Native American woman said that she, too, could relate to the experience of trying to bridge the intergenerational cultural gap between Can and his traditional parents.
She said that many young Native Americans have conflicts with their more traditional parents. She said the film was powerful in rendering that situation. Her comment made me think how such human experiences resonate universally, no matter how culturally-specific we may think they are. A medical doctor told me he learned a lot and the film gave him insight into his ex-girlfriend who was from Taiwan. He made no mention of the medical stuff.

We also got a few negative responses, which was expected. 2 people said the film wasn't enjoyable, but educational. Some said it was a little disjointed, but I already knew that. But overall, I received much better
responses than I had expected.

Ellen Owens-Summo, the Vice Pres of the Arizona Public Health Association, said she felt frustrated throughout the film b/c she felt like Can's identity was like fused with his mental illness. She didn't feel like he was moving forward. I told her she was witnessing the reality of the situation. Can sometimes does over-identify with his mental disorder and talks about it incessantly. Though he has gotten better lately. One of his friends sometimes jokingly refers to him as Mr. Bipolar. He is stuck in certain ways. In a way, her comment was a compliment b/c it meant that we were accurately portraying reality as uncomfortable as that was. But this was clearly a struggle that I as a director have had to deal with over and over again. Showing Can's repetitiveness makes him less likable, but it is in actuality how he behaves. Should I make a deliberate effort to make him more likable with less regard for accuracy? Yes, some producers/directors would say. No, is what I have been saying. But I am open to making him more likeable without detracting from the overall integrity of the reality.

I was so glad that the screening was over. Because of my home burglary on Aug 11, I lost 2 wks of editing time and felt so inadequate presenting the cut as it was. I was actually glad that the audience size was smaller than expected because the cut wasn't where it should have been. I was running on pure adrenaline for the last 2 days before leaving for Phoenix and I had gotten only an hour of sleep the night before I flew out of NJ. I was so relieved.

Sept 11 - The day after my screening, I attended the conference as a participant and learned so much about American public health issues, like how social determinants affect health and longevity. Cheryl Easley, President of the American Public Health Assoc. gave an inspiring speech about human rights and health disparities. Native Americans have an average lifespan far below the American average. People with serious and chronic mental illnesses live 25 years less than the average American for a multitude of reasons related to side effects of medications and other
social and economic factors.

I also attended this workshop about obstetric care for Somali refugees in Phoenix. And I was really impressed with the extent to which this obstetrican/gynecologist went to in order provide culturally and linguistically appropriate care to these refugees who fled their homelands because of the civil war there. The clinic was highly successful. The only question I had going through my mind was how is it that these Somalis are able to receive culturally competent medical care after only being here for a few years? Asian Americans have been in this country for 4 centuries and yet many Asian Americans do not receive culturally and linguistically competent medical care. Is it the model minority myth that makes people think that Asian Americans do not need culturally competent mental health care? Maybe probably?

Do you know that one's race to some extent is a reliable predictor of lifespan and health outcomes? Income and socioeconomic status often affect diet, levels of stress and exercise habits. All these factors affect our health choices. Did you know that most immigrants, even those from developing countries, are healthier than most average Americans upon arrival? But as soon as they start assimilating to the American lifestyle, their health goes downhill. It's a conundrum. Check out this
documentary clip: http://www.unnaturalcauses.org/video_clips.php

SEPT 12- AMAZING SEDONA
redrockcountry.org

I went to Sedona to do research on Navajo and Hopi languages and cultures for my next film about the linguistic history of the U.S. Unbeknownst to most Americans, this land was once the home of thousands of Native American languages, many of which are now extinct or are in danger of extinction today. Franz Boas, the father of anthropology, could not even begin to categorize all of them due to vast numbers and variations of languages and dialects. Modern day America is the most monolingual this land has ever been. I think this is such a fascinating statement, given the current legal, social and cultural debates surrounding the use of English and Spanish. Many Americans are debating whether they want to live in a bilingual society, much less a land where thousands of languages are spoken. As a Korean American, I've heard so many racist comments leveled at recent immigrants who do not speak English well as if all Americans "should" speak English. This "should" is culturally induced and certainly not a prerequisite for American Citizenship. In fact, Citizenship tests are frequently given in many languages because of Title VI of the U.S. Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of national origin. (My grandmother when she was 82 took her test in Korean and proudly scored a 96% on her exam, much to our surprise.) There is a misconception that America is supposed to be a English monolingual society, when, in fact, our ancestors and forefathers were multi-lingual. Not to mention the fact that the first Amendment of the Bill of Rights explicitly prohibits government from interfering freedom of speech rights. It has been my personal mission as an American to correct these kinds of social wrongs from happening. The film will map out the historical and prehistorical linguistic landscape of the U.S. beginning with the tongues of the Native Americans, most of whose languages did not have a written form.

I did not make it up into Navajo and Hopi reservations in Northern Arizona. I just didn't have the time and money, though I certainly did have the will. I spoke with many of the Navajo vendors who sold their jewelry and arts by the roadside at the local Dairy Queen on one of the main arteries through town. Through some of these women, I learned a bit about the culture and where the main reservations were. It seemed to help that I was Korean and was able to relate to some of their cultural dilemmas about assimilation and language. Many Native Americans have diabetes and other serious and chronic health issues.

I camped out in a tent in Sedona for 4 days, much to my own amazement. I thought I would be scared to camp alone, but after doing a little research, I discovered that I was by far safer camping alone in Sedona than living in my apartment in Jersey City. Sleeping under the stars and waking up at dawn hasn't really been a part of my lifestyle. I was going to sleep a few hours after sunset and getting up an hour after dawn, which is so contrary to my usual night owl routine.

I climbed Cathedral Rock, which is a gorgeous and amazing place to be. The views are mesmerizing and there is a spiritual and mystical quality about Sedona. I learned that there are vortexes in Sedona, which are some kind of energy fields. I had to go on all fours for latter part of the rock climb. It was a precariously dangerous 60 degree incline at a few points, where one slip could lead to death or serious injury -- at least a 40-50 foot fall. I paused, looked down and got too scared to climb further. At one point, I had given up and was ready to climb back down until 2 passerbyers cheered me on and told me not to give up. It was all a mental game. Once you begin to entertain the notion of falling, you can't go on but the minute you think you can, you can. And I made it up 3/4 of the way to the top, way past the point at which I thought I couldn't go on because it was too dangerous. What an amazing zen experience!
For some pictures of Cathedral Rock, click below:
http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&source=hp&q=cathedral+rock+sedona&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=Kku1SsPON9iD8Qb3t4S6Dg&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=5

Unfortunately, I have absolutely no photos to share with you! The photos I took are all gone. Something is wrong with my brand new Polaroid camera. I came home and tried to download my photos from my camera, only to discover that there was absolutely nothing on my SD card or camera memory. Bizarre.

On my last day in Sedona, AZ, I went back to the vortex at Cathedral Rock and meditated. I also thanked God for the wonderful time and all the terrific people I had met on this glorious journey. I was truly blessed to have this time in Sedona on this journey... What a gift these past few days have been... Thank you God.

Many thanks to all of you who have helped me to make this cut, workshop, and screening possible by helping me with a hundred different details. Many thanks to the Mental Health Assoc. of California, Dianne Yamashiro-Omi of The California Endowment, and Nicholas Martin, editor. Thank you Pat Shea of NASMHPD for believing me and my project. Thank you Narges Maududi of NASMHPD for paying for my travel. Thank you Dr. Hyung Chol Yoo of ASU and Minh Ta. Thank you to my family and friends: Karen Glasser, Ben Park, Jackie Hu, Linda Hattendorf, Bill Lichtenstein, all those who attended my NYWIFT screening (Nuria and Chris), Ellen Owens-Summo, Jennifer Bonnet of the AZ PHA, Bill Stewart and Ann Marshall of NARPA. My super fantastic neighbors/friends: Eleanor Kaufman, Rich Greenstein and Ben Bartholomew.

Deconstructing the Model Minority Myth - Workshop at National Association of Rights Protection and Advocacy (NARPA)

2009-09-06T14:36:00.018-04:00

The perception of Asian Americans as model minorities who are academically and economically successful with few social problems has done a great disservice to Asian Americans, in general, and a grave injustice to Asian Americans who experience mental health issues, in particular. Among all the ethnic groups in the U.S., Asian Americans with mental illnesses are least likely to find culturally and linguistically competent services in part because of this public perception. This notion of Asian Americans being diligent, industrious and capable of overcoming the many social and economic obstacles to the American dream has, inadvertently, been used to deny Asian Americans equitable access to social services. To further compound the issue of inequitable access to mental health services, many Asian Americans with mental illness are not revealing their psychological needs, requesting services, or stepping up to assert their rights under the law. This is the model minority myth, which basically reinforces the capitalistic ideology that America is a meritocracy, where a strong work ethic will be rewarded with financial wealth. Conservatives use the Asian American model minority myth to disparage other racial groups for "not making it" without looking at the underlying sociological complexities that tell the real story. The fact is the Asian American under-earn in comparison to their White counterparts when comparing educational background and years of experience in the same jobs. Asian Americans have historically over-invested in education in order to offset the effects of discrimination. Many believing that attaining advanced degrees from prestigious schools are the only means to achieving financial and career success.

The term Asian American assumes a certain level of homogeneity even when none exists. How federal govt defines Asian American as people having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent. Asian groups are not limited to nationalities but include ethnic terms as well, such as Hmong.
Heterogeneity of this group - 43 distinct ethnic groups, more than 100 languages, and multi-religious, including but not limited to Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam.
50-70% are foreign-born and speak a language other than English at home. Approximately 40% of the Asian American population immigrated to the U.S. between 1990-2000.

The truth is that this group of people labeled "Asian Americans" really does not exist as a homogenous group of people, but are a highly diverse, multi-religious, group of 43 different ethnicities and more than 100 languages. Despite this inordinate diversity, Asian Americans, like other non-European populations, were racialized, perceived and treated in particular ways because of their race. The 2000 Census showed that the largest 5 Asian American groups are Chinese, Phillipino, Vietnamese, Korean and Asian Indian.

Here's an excellent article written by Hyung Chol (Brandon) Yoo, a professor of psychology at Arizona State University, with whom I will be presenting with at NARPA:
http://www.education.com/reference/article/unraveling-minority-myth-asian-students/

Here is my outline of Workshop at the 2009 National Association of Rights Protection and Advocacy (http://www.narpa.org/) in Phoenix, AZ on Sept 10.

Introduction and brief summary - Pearl [3 min}
When I first started this film project, it was with the intention of helping to break the silence about mental illness within Asian American communities and to contribute to the broader public discourse about mental health and cultural competency. I soon came to realize that many people in mainstream mental health organizations did not perceive as Asian Americans as having social problems and made little to no outreach efforts to Asian Americans. Even the most educated among them had internalized stereotypes about Asian Americans in their minds, coloring their perceptions of Asian Americans. I realized that even before the issue of cultural competency could be dealt with that the myth of the model minority first had to be dispelled. Many Asian Americans do not want to acknowledge that they have mental health issues in their communities and families. The denial and shame has made Asian Americans, the least to seek mental health services among all the ethnic groups in the U.S. The model minority myth actually helps to obscure the truth and reinforces the denial.
We are fortunate to have Dr. Hyung Chol Yoo, Associate Professor of Psychology of Arizona State Univ. and scholar. One of his specialties is the model minority myth. But first I'd like to show the first 20 minutes of a documentary film in progress, Can. Some of you may know Can Truong, who is a board member of NARPA.

VIDEO – Clip from documentary film “Can” [20 min]
Defining Asian America - [Pearl] [3 min]
What AA means in conversation - Most people think of people of East Asian ancestry such as Chinese, Korean and Japanese, when the term "Asian American" is used. But for the purposes of this workshop, we will be using the term to refer to
How federal govt defines AA -Asian refers to people having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent. Asian groups are not limited to nationalities but include ethnic terms as well, such as Hmong.
Heterogeneity of this group - 43 distinct ethnic groups, more than 100 languages, and multi-religious, including but not limited to Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam.
50-70% are foreign-born and speak a language other than English at home. Approximately 40% of the Asian American population immigrated to the U.S. between 1990-2000.
III. Describe Historical, sociopolitcal context and clearer definition of the model minority myth [Brandon--12 minutes]
Definition of racism - Media images that reinforces AAMMM
Not a stereotype, but a construct that reinforces the power structure
History/Sociopolitical Background
Defining Model Minority Myth and components.
VIDEO - Experts describing Model Minority Myth within the context of mental health - [10 mins]

Deconstructing the model minority myth [Brandon--10 minutes]
Ethnic Heterogeneity
Selective Immigration
Context Dependency

Implications of the MMM [Brandon--10 minutes]
Interracial tension
glass ceiling
psychological distress
Asian American women and suicide
mental health service use
silence and invisibility [Pearl] [5 mins]
lack of cultural competency care
Lack of understanding mental health experience/needs
Lack of media images of AA with mental health issues. Media images of AAs most typically reinforce cultural myths and stereotypesMany major mental health organizations are not conducting outreach to Asian Americans and currently, there exists no national Asian American grassroots groups that are dealing with mental health issues. Asian American women between the ages of 15-24 have among the highest suicide rates in the nation, with only Native American women leading the rates.

The Real Costs of Not Having Universal Health Care

2009-07-27T23:33:00.020-04:00

Have you read the news lately? There was a mother who killed her child and then herself in Sugar Land, TX. Another woman in San Antonio, TX decapitated her newborn son and ate his body parts. Both had a serious and untreated mental illness. The Sugarland, TX woman had bipolar disorder and the San Antonio, TX woman has schizophrenia and postpartum psychosis. Both fell through the cracks in our for-profit health system.

I hate to pick on Texas, because this is a national problem. According to the Bazelton Mental Health Law Center, in 2006, the US Department of Justice found that 43% of jail inmates and 32% of prison inmates had symptoms of mental illness. Only about 23% of them had been treated in the year before their arrest. Recidivism rates were high: 64% of released inmates with mental illnesses were rearrested and 48% were hospitalized after 18 months. It is estimated as many as 80% of those on death row have a serious and chronic untreated mental illness. Many people with mental illnesses unwittingly wind up as victims or perpetrators of crimes. They often do not receive the quality health care they deserve that may make the difference between leading a productive life and landing in a cell. All too often, our for-profit health care system often dispenses care in accordance with a person’s ability to pay rather than in the best interests of that person’s health.

Otty Sanchez the San Antonio, TX woman was released 9 days earlier from a hospital that deemed her not a threat to herself or others. I have to seriously wonder whether the type of insurance she had was taken into consideration in her release, which frequently happens in psychiatric emergency rooms across the country. Many with chronic and severe illnesses like schizophrenia are customarily medicated and sent out the door, a phenomenon recognized as the revolving door syndrome for hospital. The conversations between the doctor and patient are centered around medications, rather than deeper life issues, which may reveal the patient's more intimate psychological state of mind. Certain insurance plans allows a certain number of inpatient hospital stays. Though I can't comment on the particulars of her case, it's not unusual for some hospital administrations to limit inpatient hospitalizations and paper process the uninsured out as soon as possible because of budget constraints on charity care. I don’t know what kind of insurance plan Ms. Sanchez had; nevertheless, Ms. Sanchez has full health care coverage now -- probably for life -- because she’s sitting in a San Antonio jail for killing and eating her 4-week old son. By law, inmates are entitled to completely free health care coverage using taxpayer dollars, but innocent people are not. It's ironic because quality psychological care just a week before could have prevented her from committing such a senseless and heinous crime. You might say that our system needs to be treated for its insanity all its own.

Republicans argue that the cost of an universal health care system is too costly and that the rich will have to bear more than their share. But we as a society already bear the costs of untreated mental illnesses in the form of dead bodies, tragically wasted lives, and millions of dollars into our very ineffective criminal justice system – ineffective because it does not mete out justice for those are suffering from a mental illness. Many convicts with mental illnesses are victims of their own symptoms; many people with chronic and serious mental illnesses become indigent as a result of not receiving care. As they become increasingly more needy of health care, they are less likely to be in a state of mind to be employable and to afford health insurance. I am convinced whatever costs we have to bear to implement a universal health care plan, we will save in the number of inmates we will not have to house. It costs something like $40-80,000/year to house inmates – to give 3 meals/day, recess, medical care, free college education and a roof over their head. I don't know the exact costs of prosecuting a crime are, but I imagine that, too, must cost a fortune in taxpayer dollars because a single court case generates work for judges, attorneys, police departments and clerks, not to mention the mountains of administrative paperwork -- all because someone didn't get that inpatient hospitalization that they should have. Do the math. Figuring that nearly a quarter of our prison and jail population probably would not end up there if they had access to quality mental health care, medical expenses which would likely cost a lot less than $40,000/year, it would be more cost effective to implement an universal health care system, a system that serves based on need rather than the ability to pay, than to prosecute people who commit crimes as a result of suffering from a treatable medical condition.

Mind you, the majority of people with mental illness are not violent, but due to the decompensation that happens when the person does not have treatment, by treatment I mean people who care and see that person gets their needs met, he or she experiences a downward spiral that often debilitates that person’s ability to manage daily life. That’s what a universal health care system would, theoretically do – provide quality treatment in the best interests of a person’s health regardless of their ability to pay and meaningful preventive early intervention – way before the illness becomes a disability and way before the person loses their job, their family, their financial security and their last thread of hope.

While mental illness can disable, it does not have to be debilitating. Many people with mental illnesses lead highly productive,and in general successful lives. However, there are some with psychiatric disabilities who rely on Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) to live on. It is a safety net for people with disabilities and includes Medicaid coverage; however, of these, many who recover from their disability and can work choose to continue to collect SSDI because they cannot afford to lose their health insurance benefits. People with psychiatric disabilities, in particular, frequently have expensive medications and other benefits, that would not necessarily be a part of a private group insurance plan. I’m convinced that many people on SSDI who would like to work would go off Disability Insurance the minute that health care coverage becomes an universal reality. The subject of my documentary film (www.amongourkin.org) has been on disability since 1996 and is deeply ashamed of being on Social Security Disability Insurance though he feels that he should not feel ashamed because SSDI is a safety net designed to help people with disabilities. They often feel ashamed, which actually compounds their pre-existing emotional issues of inadequacy, that they have to be dependent on the government to survive and that they cannot stand on their own two feet. People on SSDI can earn up to about $1,000/ month without losing their disability benefits, which allows them to work part-time. But because health care costs a fortune and most private group health insurance plans do not have as much coverage as Medicaid or Medicare, they sadly cannot afford get off of SSDI even when they desperately want to.

They say that Social Security will be bankrupt by the time Baby Boomers retire. Would it be bankrupt if millions of these people with disabilities who want to work could actually work without losing their health care benefits? I wonder how many of these people would make the choice to join the workforce when universal health care becomes a reality. Considering that there are 50 million people with disabilities on the U.S., and many of them on SSDI, can you imagine the millions of dollars we could save by providing universal coverage?

Basically, our system inadvertently rewards criminal behavior and people with disabilities who are not working with free health care coverage. Is it me or the system who’s crazy? I think innocent people, by law, should have access to quality health care that is about their health and caring. Prevention is always cheaper than treatment. Quality medical care should always include healing modalities that aren't about pharmaceutical drugs, but about managing stress, which helps to keep mental health issues abay. Every person deals with stress in their daily life; this is about the human condition and the vulnerability that accompanies living. Good health care gives people life coping skills and an opportunity to regain their dignity after losing their judgment and community connections due to their illness. I don’t think people should have to commit a crime or claim disability in order to see a doctor and get their medical needs met. Give people with disabilities the right to work with losing their health benefits. Work contributes to their dignity. Universal health care coverage would ultimately cut costs for many federal, state and local social service programs and eventually reduce crime by at least 25%.

Rough Cut Screening NYWIFT

2009-06-19T00:57:00.004-04:00

I watched the audience watch the film and no one appeared bored or looked around. I can honestly say that it seems that the film held their attention until the very end. I was really upset going into the screening because I could not output my latest cut to DVD and I had to actually show an earlier cut that Linda and I worked on in March.
I am not exactly sure how it went. I would say that most people thought it should be a feature length film. I could not assess exactly to what degree Can's story held their interest. A few said that it was powerful and gripping. Alison, the moderator, has a particular way of holding the post-screening discussion. I, the filmmaker, was not allowed to talk or ask questions until the end, by which time I had forgotten all the questions that ran through my head during the discussion. I am still not sure how many liked the film.

There was some consensus about too much Can talking, and not enough verite. Mixed reviews on the experts again; mixed reviews on many things. Some of this was rather predictable. Casper said that there were two films in this film, one about Can's journey and the other about Asian American mental health. I think I sort of agree because the latter film is what I had initially started out making.

One woman who didn't seem to like the film said that she wanted Can to try to get a job or try to date. She got the sense that he didn't take risks and did more talking than doing. Getting verite footage with Can was next to impossible at times because he would often talk directly to the camera as if it was a person. And sometimes when I would be shooting good verite footage, he or members of his family would tell me that I was shooting nothing. Aagh the frustrations of shooting. Because of many of these factors, I kept shooting for 3 and a half years and still felt that I didn't get the deeper truths. I do know one thing and that is that no one can be a fly on the wall. The Hawthorne effect, a psychological phenomenon, is how people behave differently and more self-consciously when they know they are being watched. So no action in front of the camera is pure.

When You Cannot Speak About the Thing That Most Pains You

2009-04-21T04:00:00.013-04:00

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

2009-04-04T23:15:00.037-04:00

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!

2009-04-01T21:24:00.010-04:00

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.

New 56-min Rough Cut in Progress

2009-03-27T02:55:00.013-04:00

I've been editing for the past week with Linda Hattendorf, the producer/director/editor of The Cats of Mirikitani (thecatsofmirikitani.com). She has put together a nearly hour long rough cut for submission to our next grant submission for post production funding. She has been terrific, working long hours in order to meet our deadline of April 1. The Cats of Mirikitani won numerous awards in the festival circuit, The Audience Award at Tribeca. I was very touched by her film when I first saw it at the Cinema Village in NYC a few years ago. So naturally when a friend of a friend recommended her to me as an editor, I seized the opportunity. (Though initially I had searched for a Vietnamese/English bilingual editor, I was not able to find someone in NYC with experience I needed.) The film was one of the most heartwarming stories that I have seen in years and has the power to soften the most cynical of souls. It's like a non-pharmaceutical anti-depressant, sure to lift one's spirit. The story of how they bond and how Jimmy reconciles parts of his traumatic past are poignant.

After much discussion, research, restructuring and contemplation, we are putting together a rough cut at least 56 mins long. She seems to think that the film may work as a feature film and has said that the film is very important in showing how Asian American families deal with mental illness. It is so good to have her as an ally and advocate. Now a few director of an Asian American Institute has expressed an interest in sponsoring a talk or screening because Linda has told them about the film. I am so fortunate to have her working by my side this week and so happy to have met her. Because my film also touches upon the Consumer Movement which, to my knowledge, has not been shown previously in documentary films, it may be a first for PBS. And now I am in the process of scheduling a rough cut screening through New York Women in Film and Television, a professional association of women. The viewers will all be professional film people whose judgment will tell me whether it should be a short or feature.

Like so many other indy filmmakers, I also have mounting debts and no income-generating work. Luckily for me, I have had many successful and profitable years working as an artist and have marketable skills that will enable me to sustain myself once this project is over. The only thing I want more than money is sleep right now, but I am too wired after spending a day looking at footage and combing through nearly 600 pages of transcripts for clips to put into my cut. It's been a difficult day. I learned that Can is finally returning home to Dayton, OH for a week after a year away from his family. Can has been living in Stockbridge, MA serving as a personal care assistant for his friend, John Aldam, who is disabled from his spinal tumor. So now on top of writing the grant due April 1, I also have to do pre production for the shoot in April 6, for which I have no money. Oh there is so much to do without the funding to do it all. To be continued... in my next post.

History of the Consumer Movement

2009-03-16T17:02:00.005-04:00

Can, the subject of my documentary, has been active in the consumer movement, which is something I was not familiar with until I started shooting this film. He is among the very few Asian Americans are involved in this flourishing social and political effort started by former psychiatric patients whose experiences with the mental health system were less than favorable. There is a growing National Network of Consumer/Survivor groups. Some of them are the National Empowerment Center (http://www.power2u.org). Though there is stigma in the Euro-American community, there tens of thousands of Caucasian American consumers who are open about their psychiatric histories and experiences as mental patients. In contrast, there are probably about less than 10 Asian Americans out of about 7 million Asian Americans who are active in the consumer movement, a disproportionately low number. Because the lifetime prevalence rate of mental illness which is 47% in the general population is the same among Asian Americans, approximately half of the 14 million Asian Americans has, had or will have a mental illness in their lifetime. This is one area that Asian Americans are grossly underrepresented and underserved. The low numbers of Asian Americans utilizing mental health services and appearing in patient populations reinforce the model minority myth that Asian Americans are usually socio-economically mobile and do not have mental illnesses, which we know to be false.

Because of the lack of Asian American mental health advocates who are engaged in policy-making efforts, there are a lack of state and federal resources going to services for Asian Americans. In many states and in our Federal government, mental health policies are shaped and formed with input from consumers as well as professionals.

From the website of the National Coalition of Mental Health Consumer Survivor Organizations (nsmhcso.org): "NCMHCSO was built on the foundation laid by the courageous work of those who started the mental health consumer/survivor movement in the early 1970’s. Those early
leaders were people with diagnoses of mental illness, who were inspired by people who
were finding strength, courage and power by joining together to work for human and civil
rights."

Below is an excerpt from Wikipedia about the consumer movement:

There is a growing movement throughout the United States (and the world) of people calling themselves consumers, survivors, or ex-patients--who have been diagnosed with mental disorders and are working together to make change in the mental health system and in society. The consumer movement grew out of the idea that individuals who have experienced similar problems, life situations, or crises can effectively provide support to one another. According Sally Clay, one of the leaders of this movement, The Consumer/Survivor Communities began 25 years ago with the anti-psychiatry movement. In the 1980's, ex-mental patients began to organize drop-in centers, artistic endeavors, and businesses. Now hundreds of such groups are flourishing throughout the country. Our conferences (many sponsored by NIMH) have been attended by thousands of people. More and more, consumers participate in the rest of the mental health system as members of policy-making boards and agencies. When it began, there was an initial hostility toward the mental health system, but the consumer movement has evolved into a recovery model that encompasses everyone involved in caring for people with mental disorders.
From around the country, people who had been in treatment for schizophrenia and other forms of serious mental illness began coming out of the shadows and identifying ourselves. We were no longer willing to remain hiding, quietly suffering the ridicule and hostility that too often characterize people's reactions to serious mental illness. Slowly, we began to organize, forming local, state, and then national organizations for recovering persons and our allies. We advocated, trying to regain our rights as human beings. For the most part, the more articulate consumer-advocates felt that professionals, who so readily dismissed our point-of-view when we had been patients, were not to be trusted. Many of us felt we could make it "on our own." And why not? All of us had been diagnosed with having serious mental illnesses...About twelve years ago, however, some consumer-advocates began to suggest that many of us, particularly those who were most disabled, could not so easily make it "on our own."We suggested that most of us did indeed need other people: family members, friends, and often the help of experienced mental health professionals.Frederick J. Frese The importance of the consumer movement has been recognized and documented by mainstream mental health, such as in the Surgeon General's Report.

Vietnamese Man Uses Hands to Administer Energy Healing

2009-03-12T16:06:00.005-04:00

Many traditional healing arts are remarkably effective. Though the US often boosts of its technological advances in medicine, our country lacks research into healing folk arts which have been around for millenia. As a Korean American, I know that the folk healers have a special touch of groundedness that professional doctors of Western medicine do not. I know that faith in one's healer has much to do with the health outcomes. Trust and love can be healing in of themselves. Anyways, Can who has been doing some energy healing with his hands passed on this article to me.

Vietnamese Man Uses Hands to Administer Energy Healing.

URL: http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-8408987_ITM

COPYRIGHT 2001 San Jose Mercury News

Byline: Elsa C. Arnett

HANOI _ He isn't listed in any doctors' directory.

But hundreds of people will attest to his remarkable healing powers.

Dung Tran uses only one medical tool: his hands. The fingers are bony, the skin at the knuckles have wizened, the fingertips are stained a faint copper from years of potent Singapore cigarettes. Overall, they seem pretty ordinary for a 75-year-old.

Until you touch them. Tran's hands are toasty, almost bordering on hot, as if he just lifted them from the sides of a steaming bowl of noodle soup.

Tran uses his hands, and their heat, to administer an ancient form of Asian medicine known in Vietnam as nhan dien, or ''energy healing.''

For centuries, folk remedies such as energy healing, crushed tiger bone and extracted bear bile were all that Vietnamese people had to treat ailments from a sore back to a stroke. Not any longer. These days, Western medicine abounds in Vietnam. Hospitals have high-tech diagnostic devices; pharmacy shelves are stocked with drugs from the United States, France and Germany.

Yet many Vietnamese still cling to the familiar. They continue to rub a pungent homespun alcohol on an arthritic back. They continue to stroke a coin vigorously into their skin to ease a bad cold. They continue to make a bitter, black brew from dried plants to settle an upset stomach.

They continue to line up at Tran's doorstep so his fingertips can try to soothe their ulcers, slow their cancers and quell their seizures.

For many Vietnamese, a cure lies not in a pre-processed tablet, but from the harmony between their bodies, their minds and the natural world. For them, the latest advances in modern medicine cannot compete with the time-tested remedies passed down over several thousand years.

''Nature influences many things that go on in us,'' said Tran, who spent most of his life as a philosophy and foreign language professor in Hanoi. ''People get migraines during thunderstorms, people feel energetic in sunlight. It only makes sense that if nature can harm us, it can also help us.''

Energy healing hails from China and India as far back as 4,000 years and is practiced by millions of people throughout Asia. The theory requires one person _ Tran, for example _ to become a giant heat magnet and absorb energy from nature and transfer it to another person.

In Asian medicine, the human body is all about balance and the smooth flow of energy through the veins and organs. The infusion of added energy from healer to patient is supposed to open whatever clog has developed to block that smooth flow, restoring equilibrium.

In the United States, energy healing is one of the many alternative therapies that are only grudgingly gaining the respect of mainstream medicine. American researchers are working on experiments to figure out why energy healing, herbs, deep breathing and even laughter seem to boost people's health.

Until they find a scientific explanation, many of these therapies remain on the fringes. Health insurance companies won't cover them. People who seek them do so at their own risk, and expense.

''The medical community is still keeping alternative medicine at arms length,'' said Dr. John Wahdud Laird, director of the Jaffe Institute of Spiritual and Medical Healing, an energy healing school in California's Napa Valley. ''But there is a much more open attitude towards these things than there was five or 10 years ago.''

Immigrants have helped to popularize energy healing in the Bay Area, where it has become a fixture in the world of alternative medicine.

It's hard to know how many in Vietnam rely on energy healing. The Vietnamese government does not keep track of healers like Tran; it wouldn't be easy even if they tried. Most of these healers take classes from various healing masters, but they aren't certified. Most work out of their living rooms. Most are as mysterious as the healing they practice.

Tran doesn't advertise. He doesn't charge, either. His skills, he says, were given to him by God. Comfortably retired, he would not sully them by taking money.

Many who arrive at Tran's doorstep come after everything else has failed. They hear about him by word-of-mouth: so-and-so's mother who knows so-and-so's brother went to Tran and was cured, they say. Next thing, Tran has a new patient.

That's how Phuong Nguyen found himself cross-legged on Tran's lacquered wood coffee table that fills one-third of Tran's living room.

Nguyen, 29, was studying design in Montreal. At the start of his second year of classes, he began to feel anxious, restless, sweaty. He stared at the ceiling of his dorm room and couldn't fall asleep.

First, Nguyen went to the clinics at his university, then to specialists. They came up with nothing. They did blood test after blood test. Nothing. They gave him tranquilizers. Still, nothing.

Nguyen became so exhausted, he had to withdraw from school and return to Hanoi. There, he went to an acupuncturist, then to an herbalist. Nothing helped. Desperate, Nguyen took his father's advice and visited Tran.

That first day, he was led through a small, leafy, courtyard and into Tran's living room. Tran told him to slip off his shoes and sit on the table. Nguyen was told to close his eyes, relax his body, and try to clear his mind of thoughts and worries.

Then, Tran stepped up on the table, rubbed his hands together, and maneuvered around Nguyen, pressing his index fingers into various pulse points of Nguyen's temples, cheeks, neck, spine and chest. Then he moved on to his legs, ankles and toes.

Both Nguyen and Tran's minds were deep in concentration. Only the echo of schoolgirls chattering outside or the bang of a hammer from three houses down broke the silence.

About 45 minutes later, Tran was done. At first, Nguyen didn't notice anything. But after visiting Tran for three days, Nguyen fell asleep that night for the first time in months for a solid three hours. By the end of two weeks, he could sleep for six to eight hours. The sweating stopped. So did the jitters. Now, several months later, Nguyen is practicing on his own and is awaiting a visa to return to his studies in Montreal.

How did energy healing help him when nothing else could? Nguyen doesn't know. And he said, ''I don't need to know. I just know I feel so much better. I have my life back again.''

Tran, who has practiced energy healing for about a decade, realizes all this might sound suspicious. He doesn't take it personally. He was dubious, too, once.

He had heard bits and pieces about energy healing for years. But he didn't think much of it until he went to say goodbye to an old school friend who was diagnosed with a late-stage of cancer.

When Tran saw his friend, he saw that he looked remarkably fit, was still able to go out and eat and talk with friends, and ended up living for three years longer than doctors had predicted. The secret, the friend said, was energy healing.

Curious, Tran decided to study with the same teacher who had instructed his friend. Tran hoped it might ease the two ulcers, the erratic heart-beat, the dizzy spells, and the general fatigue that had troubled him all his life.

Three months into his lessons, his stomach felt better, and to his delight, he was well enough to drink beer again. A year later, his heartbeat returned to normal. He felt stronger than he did when he served in the military years ago.

Grateful for this gift, Tran decided to try to help others. Since then, his fingers have worked on hundreds of people. There's the 8-year-old boy with epilepsy, the 42-year-old woman with a bleeding ulcer, the 60-year-old woman with deteriorating eye sight, the 65-year-old woman with breast cancer, and his own wife who had almost lost all use of her left arm.

Tran said that all have improved. Did he, or more precisely, did energy healing make them better? He doesn't profess to be a miracle worker. Tran said he is simply helping people heal naturally, though he admits that there are always a few he cannot help.

Tran could talk a lot more about energy healing, but not today. There is a woman at his gate with her 10-year-old daughter. The little girl has had a sinus infection for two years. Medications haven't helped. Sometimes the pain is so bad she buries her tiny face in her hands. They stand waiting for Tran, their faces anxious and expectant.

Tran jumps up from his chair, rubs his hands together and prepares for the next challenge.

(c) 2001, San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.).

Visit Mercury Center, the World Wide Web site of the Mercury News, at http://www.sjmercury.com/

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

The Expose on Big Pharma

2009-03-07T14:22:00.005-05:00

In the past few months, much corruption in the world of psychiatry has been exposed by a New York Times reporter named Gardiner Harris. Several prominent psychiatrists, Charles Nemeroff and Joseph Biederman, and Fred Goodwin never disclosed publicly or to their employers and funders that they were receiving large sums in excess of a million dollars by pharmaceutical companies while they were serving in positions that required them to disclose any conflicts of interests. Sadly, this revelation undermines the integrity of psychiatric research going on in this country. They say that Dr. Biederman was responsible for clinical research that was basically resulted in the 40 fold increase of the diagnosis of bipolar disorder in children. Frightening. It made me glad that I didn't have children. 40 fold increase!!!???!!! Is that not insane? Not that the integrity of psychiatric research wasn't damaged in the first place. Certainly, many in the consumer movement knew well that the pharmaceutical companies exerted undue influence in nearly every arena of mental health services. They are indeed motivated by profit, not public health.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/04/health/policy/04drug.html
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/joseph_biederman/index.html
http://www.policymed.com/2009/01/letters-from-grassley-harvard-and-biederman-get-the-facts.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/22/health/22radio.html

This is an article that was forwarded to me from Can Truong.

Eli Lilly and the Case for a Corporate Death Penalty
By Bruce E. Levine, AlterNet
Posted on March 3, 2009, Printed on March 5, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/129709/

Eli Lilly & Company's rap sheet as a public menace is so long that for Lilly watchers to overcome the "banality-of-Lilly-sleaziness" phenomenon, the drug company must break some type of record measuring egregiousness. Lilly obliged earlier this year, receiving the largest criminal fine ever imposed on a corporation.

If Americans are ever going to revoke the publicly granted charters of reckless, giant corporations -- well within our rights -- we might want to get the ball rolling with Lilly, whose recent actions appalled even the mainstream media. And with Lilly's chums, the Bush family, out of power, now might be the right time.

On January 15, 2009, Lilly pled guilty to charges that it had illegally marketed its blockbuster drug Zyprexa for unapproved uses to children and the elderly, two populations especially vulnerable to its dangerous side effect. Lilly plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge and agreed to pay $1.42 billion, which included $615 million to end the criminal investigation and approximately $800 million to settle the civil case.

One of the eight whistle-blowers in this case, former Lilly sales representative Robert Rudolph, says the settlement will not completely change Lilly's business practices, and he wants jail time for executives. "You have to remember, with Zyprexa," said Rudolph, "people lost their lives."

Rudolph is not exaggerating. Zyprexa, marketed as an "atypical" antipsychotic drug, has been promoted as having less dangerous adverse effects than "typical" antipsychotic drugs such as Thorazine and Haldol. However, on February 25, 2009, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that the rate of sudden cardiac death in patients taking either typical or atypical antipsychotic drugs is double the death rate of a control group of patients not taking these drugs.

Zyprexa -- though not nearly as well known as Lilly's previous blockbuster Prozac -- is today one of the biggest-selling drugs in the world. Zyprexa has grossed more than $39 billion since its approval in 1996, with $4.8 billion of that in 2007 (and it was projected to equal or surpass that gross in 2008 when earnings are reported).

Lilly has had other Zyprexa scandals, but in this current one, Lilly executives matched Charles Dickens scoundrels. Zyprexa is approved by the Food and Drug and Administration (FDA) for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, but Lilly illegally marketed it for sleep difficulties, aggression, and other unapproved uses. Lilly sales reps aggressively pushed Zyprexa as a wonderful drug to chill out disruptive children and the elderly who were not schizophrenic or bipolar. The lawsuit against Lilly stated, "In truth, this was Lilly's thinly veiled marketing of Zyprexa as an effective chemical restraint for demanding, vulnerable and needy patients."

Doctors can prescribe drugs for unapproved uses (called "off-label prescribing"), but drug companies are not allowed to market drugs for unapproved uses. Many drug companies break this rule, but Lilly broke it with gusto. “The company made hundreds of millions of dollars by trying to convince health care providers that Zyprexa was safe for unapproved uses," said Laurie Magid, acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania where the case was prosecuted. Magid said that Lilly was responsible for "putting thousands and thousands of patients at risk."

One marketing effort consisted of the Lilly sales force urging geriatricians to use Zyprexa to sedate unruly nursing home and assisted-living facilities patients. Lilly sales reps distributed a study claiming that elderly patients taking Zyprexa required fewer skilled nursing staff hours than were necessary for patients taking competing medications. Magid stated that Lilly sales reps were "trained to use the slogan five at five, meaning five milligrams at 5 o'clock at night will keep these elderly patients quiet." Illegally marketing Zyprexa for elderly patients was especially troubling for prosecutors because Zyprexa increases the risks of heart failure and life-threatening infections such as pneumonia in older patients.

In addition to targeting the misbehaving elderly, Lilly also targeted annoying kids. New York Times reporters Gardiner Harris and Alex Berenson, who have been covering Eli Lilly and Zyprexa for several years, reported on January 14, 2009, "The company also pressed doctors to treat disruptive children with Zyprexa, court documents show, even though the medicine's tendency to cause severe weight gain and metabolic disorders is particularly pronounced in children ... The children receiving Zyprexa gained so much weight during the study that a safety monitoring panel ordered that they be taken off the drug."

Mainstream reporters were so appalled by Lilly's recent actions that some voiced caustic commentaries about the relatively small price Lilly paid for its transgressions. CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson (January 15, 2009) noted, "Eli Lilly has pled guilty to marketing the sometimes dangerous drug Zyprexa in ways never proven safe or effective ... Lilly has agreed to pay $1.4 billion, including the largest criminal fine ever imposed on a corporation. Ironically, that's about as much as the company's Zyprexa sales in the first quarter last year." However, the mainstream media failed to provide the context of Lilly's horrendous history which goes back decades.

The New York Times 2009 article did at least go back as far as 2006, reminding readers of the Times exclusive on another Zyprexa scandal. In December 2006, a whistle blower handed over to the Times hundreds of internal Lilly documents and e-mail messages among top company managers that showed how Lilly had downplayed Zyprexa's association with weight gain and metabolic disorders such as diabetes.

A Rolling Stone piece earlier this year ("Marketing Lilly's Zyprexa, a Phony ‘Miracle' Drug") details how Lilly minimized Zyprexa's relationship with dramatic weight gain. In 1995, prior to FDA approval of Zypexa , Lilly's own panel of experts concluded that Zyprexa produced an average weight gain of 24 pounds in a single year (one in six patients gained more than 66 pounds); that kind of weight gain can elevate blood-sugar levels and cause diabetes. This data, however, was not submitted by Lilly to the FDA.

Lilly-Zyprexa scandals didn't just start in 2006. A 2003 Lilly-Zyprexa scandal involved Medicaid and the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI), ostensibly a consumer organization. That year, Zyprexa grossed $2.63 billion in the United States, 70 percent of that attributable to government agencies, mostly Medicaid. Zyprexa cost approximately twice as much as similar drugs, and state Medicaid programs, going in the red in part because of Zyprexa, were attempting to exclude it in favor of similar, less expensive drugs. When Kentucky's Medicaid program attempted to exclude Zyprexa -- its single largest drug expense -- from its list of preferred medications, NAMI bused protesters to hearings, placed full-page ads in newspapers, and sent faxes to state officials. What NAMI did not say at the time was that the buses, ads, and faxes were paid for by Lilly.

The Lilly-NAMI financial connection had already been exposed by Ken Silverstein in Mother Jones in 1999. Silverstein reported that NAMI took $11.7 million from drug companies over a three-and-a-half-year period from 1996 through 1999, with the largest donor being Lilly, which provided $2.87 million. Lilly's funding also included loaning NAMI a Lilly executive, who worked at NAMI headquarters but whose salary was paid for by Lilly.

Beyond Zyprexa, in 2002 fingers were pointed at Lilly for tampering with the Homeland Security Act. On November 25, 2002, soon after George W. Bush signed the Act, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert discovered what had been slipped into it at the last minute, "Buried in this massive bill, snuck into it in the dark of night by persons unknown . . . was a provision that – incredibly – will protect Eli Lilly and a few other big pharmaceutical outfits from lawsuits by parents who believe their children were harmed by thimerosal."

While it was recently revealed that research published in 1998 that linked vaccine use to autism was fraudulent, in 2002 the harmfulness of thimerosal (a preservative that contains mercury and used by Lilly and other drug companies in vaccines) was not clear. Specifically, in 1999 the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Public Health Service had urged vaccine makers to stop using thimerosal, and in 2001 the Institute of Medicine concluded that the link between autism and thimerosal was "biologically plausible." So in 2002, drug companies such as Lilly which had used thimerosal in vaccines were nervous about what scientists and the courts would ultimately determine.

How then did a drug-company protection provision get inserted in the Homeland Security Act? Here's my bet for one of Herbert's "persons unknown." In June 2002, then President George W. Bush had appointed Lilly's CEO, Sidney Taurel, to a seat on his Homeland Security Advisory Council. Ultimately even some Republican senators became embarrassed by the drug-company protection provision, and by early 2003, moderate Republicans and Democrats agreed to repeal that particular provision from the Act.

The year 2002 was a banner one for "Lillygates," with "60 Minutes II" ultimately airing another juicy Lilly scandal. Lilly's patent for Prozac had run out, and the drug company began marketing a new drug, Prozac Weekly. Lilly sales representatives in Florida gained access to patient information records, and, unsolicited, mailed out free samples of Prozac Weekly. Though they primarily targeted patients diagnosed with depression who were receiving competitor antidepressants, at least one such Prozac Weekly sample was mailed to a sixteen-year-old boy with no history of depression or antidepressant use. Law suits followed.

The most cinematic of all Lilly scandals began in 1989 and culminated in1997. One month after Joseph Wesbecker began taking Lilly's antidepressant Prozac, he opened fire with his AK-47 at his former place of employment in Louisville, Kentucky, killing eight people and wounding twelve before taking his own life. British journalist John Cornwell covered the trial for the London Sunday Times Magazine and ultimately wrote a book about it. Cornwell's The Power to Harm is not simply about a disgruntled employee becoming violent after taking Prozac; the book is about Lilly's power to corrupt a judicial system.

Victims of Joseph Wesbecker sued Lilly, claiming that Prozac had pushed Wesbecker over the edge. The trial took place in 1994 but received little attention as America was obsessed at the time by the O.J. Simpson spectacle. While Lilly had been quietly settling many Prozac violence suits, the drug company was looking for a showcase trial that it could actually win. Although a 1991 FDA "Blue Ribbon Panel" investigating the association between Prozac and violence had voted not to require Prozac to have a violence warning label, by 1994 word was getting around that five of the nine FDA panel doctors had ties to drug companies -- two of them serving as lead investigators for Lilly-funded Prozac studies. Thus with the FDA panel now known to be tainted, Lilly wanted a Prozac trial it could win, and it believed that Wesbecker's history was such that Prozac would not be seen as the cause of his mayhem.

A crucial component of the victims' attorneys' strategy was for the jury to hear about Lilly's history of reckless disregard. Victims' attorneys especially wanted the jury to hear about Lilly's anti-inflamatory drug Oraflex, introduced in 1982 but taken off the market three months later. A U.S. Justice Department investigation linked Oraflex to the deaths of more than one hundred patients, and concluded that Lilly had misled the FDA. Lilly was charged with 25 counts related to mislabeling side effects and plead guilty.

In the Wesbecker trial, Lilly attorneys argued that Oraflex information would be prejudicial, and Judge John Potter initially agreed that the jury shouldn't hear it. However, when Lilly attorneys used witnesses to make a case for Lilly's superb system of collecting and analyzing side effects, Judge Potter said that Lilly itself had opened the door to evidence to the contrary, and he ruled that Oraflex information would now be permitted. To Judge Potter's amazement, victims' attorneys never presented the Oraflex evidence, and Eli Lilly won the case.

Later it was discovered why victims' attorneys remained silent about Oraflex. In a manipulation Cornwell described as "unprecedented in any Western court," Lilly cut a secret deal with victims' attorneys to pay them and their clients not to introduce the Oraflex evidence. However, Judge Potter smelled a rat and fought for an investigation, and in 1997 Lilly quietly agreed to the verdict being changed from a Lilly victory to "dismissed as settled."

If Americans want to take on Lilly, they might want to do it during a time when the Bush family is out of power. Sidney Taurel, former Lilly CEO and George W. Bush appointee to the Homeland Security Advisory Council, is not the only Bush family-Lilly connection. George Herbert Walker Bush once sat on the Eli Lilly board of directors, as did Bush family crony Ken Lay, the Enron chief convicted of fraud before his death. Mitch Daniels, George W. Bush's first-term Director of Management and Budget, had actually been a Lilly vice president, and in 1991 he had co-chaired a Bush-Quayle fundraiser that collected $600,000. This is the same Mitch Daniels who is now governor of Indiana, Lilly's home state.

Currently, the public's right to revoke corporate charters is still recognized by the courts, but attorneys general today rarely exercise this option, and then only against small corporations. Loyola Law School Professor Robert Benson, who in 1998 petitioned California's attorney general to revoke the corporate charter of Union Oil of California (Unocal), notes that state attorneys general "don't hesitate to draw this particular arrow from their quivers when the target is some small, unpopular or socially marginal enterprise." But when it comes to egregious large multinationals, Benson concludes, "They don't even want you to know about it because they don't want to appear to be soft on corporate crime."

In his book When Corporations Rule the World, David Korten, former Harvard Business School Professor writes, "In the young American republic, there was little sense that corporations were either inevitable or always appropriate." Early in American history, Americans were very much concerned about any entity achieving too much power, and so in corporate charters there were clear limits placed on: years permitted to exist, borrowing, land ownership, extent of enterprise, and sometimes even on profits. Korten notes that in the first half of the nineteenth century, "Action by state legislators to amend, revoke, or simply fail to renew corporate charters was fairly common."

The Program on Corporations, Law & Democracy (POCLAD) was created in 1994, in part to inform Americans that they can in fact revoke corporate charters. In 1890, POCLAD explains, the highest court in New York State revoked the charter of the North River Sugar Refining Corporation in this unanimous decision: "The judgment sought against the defendant is one of corporate death ... the defendant corporation has violated its charter, and failed in the performance of its corporate duties, and that in respects so material and important as to justify a judgment of dissolution."

Giant drug corporations -- especially ones that make a killing selling dangerous drugs by hyper-pathologizing people who can't defend themselves -- get my adrenaline going; and so my candidate to get the ball rolling is Lilly, which has now made themselves vulnerable by getting in so much damn trouble. But with Lilly's man Mitch Daniels currently governor of Lilly's home state, Lilly still has pull; and so I won't be upset if some other giant sleazebag corporation receives the death penalty before Lilly.

Given the fact that Americans already have a history of revoking corporate charters, why shouldn't this practice be continued? Yes we did, yes we still can, and so yes let's do it.

Bruce E. Levine, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and author of Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007).His Web site is www.brucelevine.net

© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/129709/

The Problem of Distribution for Asian American Films

2009-02-20T00:47:00.039-05:00

Even among the best independent films in America which get into Sundance each year, only about 5% receive distribution. The film distribution game is a difficult one, one that is particularly difficult for Asian American films, which are perceived to have a narrower audience than a white film in English. It is not at all surprising that there are not that many Asian American films that make in the mainstream. It's not encouraging for most Asian American filmmakers who often have to make great sacrifices to get their film made then have to struggle to find a distributor that will adequately promote and release it to the public.

The story has been that we are not bankable, we are not a viable market with only 4% of the viewership population. I recall watching "The Grace Lee Project" with only 2 other people at the Film Forum on a Friday night when it played there for a few weekends several years ago. It was an excellently edited documentary that it kept me riveted until the very end though I had had no initial interest in the subject matter. Most good documentaries never see the light of a theatrical release. The only public play that they receive is at film festivals.

Documentaries, in general, are even less likely than indy features to make a profit so my little documentary with an Asian American lead is highly unlikely to pick up a distributor. So I often wonder what will happen to my little documentary when it hits the market. Will I find an educational market niche and change the world? Or will it become another indy film to never see the light of the day and find its way off the shelves? Luckily we live in the digital age and self-distribution is a more than plausible option.

The distribution problems for Asian American films are myriad. Once you subtitle a film, the market is reduced by 20% so say the film distributors in America. Many English-speaking Americans do not want to read subtitles or hear dubbed English while watching a film. It is no wonder that very few if any Asian American films have made it in the American marketplace. Though many of them are in English, there are many that have portions of it in an Asian language. There are layers of difficulties even producing a film in a language other than English in the U.S. because most skilled editors and production crew even in New York City are mostly English only speaking. Others are inclined to label “foreign language” films as foreign when they are made by and about Americans who speak languages other than English. Is a language foreign when a million or more Americans speak it? Such as Mandarin Chinese? Or Spanish? What constitutes foreign vs. domestic in the linguistics? Distributors are essentially business people with a concern for the bottom line, who are concerned with selling their product and attempting to reach as large of a consumer base as possible. A film with characters who speak English with an accent makes it less marketable, however good its artistic merits and human interest value may be. Good film distributors also have a concern for artistic merits in a film, but often commercial interests outweigh quality. You could have a badly written script, an implausible plot, lots of special effects, and a mediocre director, but if you find a celebrity to star it, it is a guarantee of a certain level of visibility and viewership. The film world ain’t no meritocracy.

As many of you may already know, Can Truong is a Vietnamese boat person, one of the millions who fled Vietnam in boats in search of freedom after the fall of Saigon. That fact led me to study the history of the Vietnamese boat people. Journey from the Fall, directed and written by Ham Tran, was one of the best indy films I have experienced in the past few years. I say “experienced” instead of “seen” because the film like many great works of art was an emotional experience for me. I was deeply moved, perhaps because I, too, am an immigrant and could relate to the experiences of the protagonists in certain ways that the average American could not. Though there are many white renditions of the Vietnam war and its aftermath in film, this is the first to authentically portray the experience of millions of Vietnamese who fled in overcrowded unwieldy boats, some enduring untenable levels of deprivation and suffering. It was an important untold story that needed to told by Vietnamese Americans for Vietnamese Americans. The film seemed to have catalyzed a mass catharsis in the Vietnamese community based on the few people I have spoken with. For many years, many Vietnamese boat people didn't want to speak about the horrors of the re-education camps, the pirates who raped women on the boats, and perilous journey across rough seas. Breaking the silence is the first step to healing. It was for this reason Ham was motivated to make this extraordinary film, he told me. They are my motivations for making "Can." Artistry and healing are delicately intertwined. The expression of truths facilitates healing.

Ham is an inspiration to me. He's a rock star. I am enamored with his work and artistic integrity. Despite a low budget and other numerous obstacles, he crafted an emotionally powerful story that remained true to the heart of the Vietnamese-American experience. In order to understand what I mean, you would have to see his beautiful film (www.journeyfromthefall.com) and check out some of his interviews on youtube.com:
>Ham Tran Interview by Asia Pacific Arts, Part 1 of 2
>Ham Tran Interview by Asia Pacific Arts, Part 2 of 2

And now Ham and a few other Vietnamese American filmmakers have started their own film distribution company, Wave Releasing, to promote and release their own works after realizing that most American distributors will overlook or undermarket their amazing films. Though Journey from the Fall was an extraordinary landmark achievement by any measure, it took nearly a year from the time that it premiered at Sundance to get a distributor. That is shocking to me considering the numerous other films of far lower quality which get distribution deals immediately upon its film festival premiere. Like I said, the film world is no meritocracy.

Changing "Can" to a Short Film

2009-02-19T00:08:00.017-05:00

I met with consultant today regarding fundraising for my film after getting a slew of rejection letters from foundations. It is daunting to keep writing grant applications, but this is the plight of many indy filmmakers. The consultant told me that he didn't think that my film would make it into film festivals in its current state because the film has too many expert interviews, which make it too educational instead of character-driven. The idea was to make it character-driven, but that idea also competed with the idea that the film had to educate about Asian American mental health to a certain extent because of the California Endowment grant.

I think I had it in my mind that I'd fix the problems once I began to edit and since I had been delayed so many times due to Can's relentless delays in getting home, I also had to delay making the fixes that I needed to to my most recent rough cut. So I guess I will be making a short. It may be more compelling and terser as a short.

I am sulking, but not as crazy as I expected to be. As long as there are lessons learned, nothing has been lost. This project was difficult from all angles and I knew that it was all a huge risk from the get go. I have to put my ego aside and put my social objectives first. I did succeed in raising a lot of awareness among key opinion leaders in mainstream mental health and that was an important feat to me. The model minority myth has always worked against Asian Americans with mental illnesses. The secondary myth is that you can't have a mental illness and be a model minority at the same time, but the truth is is that many successful, intelligent, productive people (e.g., Iris Chang, John Nash, Kay Redfield Jamison) do have mental illnesses. Success and mental illness are not mutually exclusive.

The hope is that these key opinion leaders will use the knowledge that they learned from our workshops and presentation in executing their jobs and gain the understanding that they need to specially train their therapists and staff to work with Asian Americans. Some of them do walk away with the understanding that they do not understand Asian American cultures and that acknowledgement of ignorance is equally as important as knowledge. Some therapists complete their clinical training without any knowledge of Asian Americans and do not understand that they may have the skills set to help counsel Asian Americans.

Embracing Dissent

2009-02-01T21:20:00.024-05:00

I have posted below an essay I wrote about dissent and how the policy of absolute tolerance can serve humanity. How is this relevant to my work as an activist and filmmaker? It can provide insights into how history consistently shows us an ever evolving truth. History can be rewritten. Science is fallible and what conventions activists may challenge today become relics tomorrow. What is radical today is considerable acceptable tomorrow.

It is based on the writings of classical utilitarian John Stuart Mill, one of my favorite dead white male philosophers.

Just a bit of history on the rights of people with mental illness, it was not until the late 1800's that people with mental illness were treated medically and that the etiology of mental illness was considered biological. Prior to that, people with schizophrenia or other psychotic disorders were often locked up and beaten. The prevailing explanatory model for mental illness during that historical period when religious beliefs dominated the culture was that these people were possessed with evil spirits and needed beatings and exorcisms, not medications or talk therapies. Just to give you some perspective on the history of the science and culture of mental illness, many psychiatric therapies such as insulin-induced comas and lobotomies which were endorsed by the American Psychiatric Association in the 1960's are today considered dangerous and barbaric. Psychiatry is less than 100 years old, one of the youngest branches of medicine. Psychiatrists don't really understand how Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors work, though they are widely prescribed to Americans daily. I raise these issues because many of today's practices may be perceived as dangerous tomorrow. Philosophically, I don't believe we can know the exact nature of truth today nor tomorrow.
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How Does Absolute Tolerance Serve the Permanent Progress Interests of Man?

"If mankind minus one were all of the same opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
-- John Stuart Mill, "On Liberty"

The atom is indivisible and all the moons and planets revolve around the earth; so man once believed, deceived by the wisest and most erudite of scholars of previous eras. Knowledge, or whatever man conceives to be true, is subject to change. The atom turned out to be so powerfully divisible that it demolished a couple of cities and killed more than a quarter million people. To the astonishment of the Catholic Church, the earth actually orbited the sun. Upon inquiry of the even most well-established and widely accepted beliefs, a new perspective can emerge. To be questioning every proven truth is to take the chance of living in the anxiety of uncertainty, or worse, losing faith in man's ego to attain knowledge. But in order to converge closer to the nature of reality, one must take this risk of contesting every belief or fact that man claims as truth.

In "On Liberty," John Stuart Mill asserts that we must allow for the absolute tolerance of all thought and discussion within the bounds of fair discussion in order to attain utility. By allowing the free exchange and expression of ideas, opinions, beliefs and perceptions, no matter what the content, society will benefit from this cultivation of diversity. Through dialectical debate, ideas, opinions, beliefs and perceptions will become refined and logically sound. Arguments which do not stand to reason will be discarded; partial truths elucidated, new compound ideas formulated. The policy of absolute tolerance will set the stage for a forum of ideas, competing to be deemed as the most sound claim. In the same way that competition in the marketplace for commodities provides the best quality goods and services for the most people possible, the most refined and logically sound ideas will become integrated into society by fierce rational competition under the policy of absolute tolerance.

Mill presents four very clear and convincing arguments for allowing the expression of every man's opinion in a given society. If the opinion is true, then a new concept is learned. If the opinion is false, the expression of that opinion can serve to test the soundness and rationale upon which a conflicting opinion rests. Only after withstanding the contests of a contrasting view, can an opinion attain a greater degree of certainty about its true nature and action based upon it able to be justified.

More often, than not is the case that a statement is neither wholly true or false, but contains a portion of truth which only stands a chance of elicitation by the dialectical examination of an opposing view. Thus the collision of such adverse forces, if guided by reason, will serve to elucidate a concealed truth or innovate a new eclectic concept.
Intellectual growth is fostered by the challenge of having to substantiate one's beliefs against another's; and impeded by ignoring the arguments of the devil's advocate. The beliefs most inherent to our society which are the least likely to be questioned are, perhaps, the most vitally in need of substantiation since the ways of our life are based upon them. Mill states that beliefs must be held in an appropriate way (i.e., one must be able to substantiate exactly why one's beliefs is true in spite of all the possible rational objections.). Individual members of society should not merely inherit the beliefs of their ancestors for the sake of practicality. One should have greater grounds upon which to hold a belief than the mere fact that the belief is held by everyone else in their society or that it was taught to him.

Only through the dialogue with another human being whose contrary perspective forces you to reasonably scrutinize those beliefs you take for granted, can the authenticity and logical soundness of that belief be appreciated. Until a christian encounters a muslim, he is never forced to realize the weaknesses of his claim. If the muslim vigorously attacks the various premises of christianity dialectically and the christian is able to refute reasonably but, yet, with emotional conviction, then his belief is being held in an appropriate way. On the other hand, if he retorts with the use of verbatim scriptural verse which have been engrained in him since birth and no genuine conviction, he is only a product of his environment, merely parroting what has been taught to him. His teachers may have truly believed in the words they taught him; however, the words ring semantically hollow in the ears of the his students and are memorized for the sake of approval. This stagnating mental state is the very condition which, Mill believes, is treacherous to the human mind and soul; and it is to reduce the unlimited human potential down to that of an automaton. Man cannot serve his permanent interests as a progressive being if he enslaved to the beliefs of society. He must exercise independent thinking and be able to make the distinction between what he genuinely believes and what has been fed to him intellectually. He must question until he has exhausted his resources in order for an answer with the greatest probability of being true to emerge. This is the necessity of the policy of absolute tolerance; man must be given the complete liberty to endeavor to discover the true nature of his convictions.

Mill's theory is logically sound and very well substantiated by his argumentations; however, in reality, complex political and sociological problems would obscure the objective of such a policy, utility, if it was actually put into effect. Mill believes that the free market economy model for commodities could be superimposed on ideas and thought as well. Unlike the principles of supply and demand in the free market for goods and services, political phenomenon in capitalistic countries inevitably allocates power and greater proclivity to a select few as a result of their inheritance, political ties, and/or financial status, not as a result of them being the most reasonably qualified. If man were as avaricious for reason as he is for money, then the analogous relationship between the free market economy for commodities and the free market economy for ideas and thoughts would be complete; however, as history clearly demonstrates that that is not the case. Reason is not the sole criterion for which a belief is translated into social policy or practice. In theoretical terms, Mill's argument is sound given that all things are equal; all political interest groups in a given state are equal; no man acquiesces to emotion and is solely rational and objective; the acquisition of knowledge is just as much a motivating force as money; all consumers of the ideas and thoughts on the market are competent and have no desire to impose their beliefs on other humans without reasonable grounds. These conditions can hardly ever be met in reality and therefore, the policy of absolute tolerance, if implemented, does not necessarily lead to utility however logically sound in theory. The policy of absolute tolerance is one many necessary conditions, but is not sufficient alone. The rights of African Americans, Native Americans, Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans have been oppressed throughout the course of American history regardless of the belief, supposedly held by the founders of this country, that all men were created equal. The white, property-owning politicans of these previous times professed great faith in the Constitution of the United States and were determined to execute it as it was written; nonetheless, history clearly shows the oppression of various minority groups, obvious violations of those very premises in Constitution which our great fathers professed to uphold in order to maintain their level of power. Had upholding reason and integrity been a greater priority over their desire for economic power, African Americans would never have been enslaved in the first place. Mill neglects to consider the human element. The select few do not necessarily have to heed the rationale of their opposing views.

Mill relies upon the existence of two opposing views in interplay to refine man's conception of truth. Whether one extreme school of thought will benefit society for utility is actually contingent upon the existence of an equally formidable and radical interest group with an opposing view which is just as determined to defend its claim. In the absence of such opposition, a very harmful ideology or thought could enter the mainstream of society. For instance, Nazism in Germany rose to power by unscrupulous means, virtually unopposed, in part because the ideology benefitted the Aryan majority by the oppression and slaughter of a minority class. there would have had to have been a B'nai B'rith Anti-defamation League with armed forces, equally as aggressively and unscrupulously propagandizing their ideology. Should we tolerate the blatant evil of bigotry in hopes that it would collide with an anthetical force even when none such exists? How does that serve society? In other words, the existence of White Supremists should be tolerated and will eventually serve the greater good of society as long as African, Asian, Latino and Native American Supremists with as much power exist alongside them. The end result of such an ideological struggle will be human people respecting the creed and color of every human being which is man's natural right. Mill did not believe in natural rights. In order for the free market economy model to operate, there must always be competition; for every man who claims that something is green, there must be another who claims that it is blue in order for it to benefit society. In the commodity market, money is the incentive to produce higher and higher quality goods; in the thought market, reason and intellectual growth is the only appeal to conjuring up more and more reasonable ideas. In capitalistic society, it is in man's own self-interest to conjure up a belief system which will make him most adaptive to his environment regardless of how inhumane or rationally baseless it may be (i.e., a belief system that will enhance one's acquisition of money and power, not one which is solidly based on reason). Wealth and power can certainly increase the quality of one's life, but no one rewards the morally and intellectually sound person in a free market economy.

Certain dogmas and ideologies undermining man's natural rights and the intrinsic dignity of human life should be restrained from instituted as policy; and the consequences of its propagandization carefully weighed against the criteria for humane conduct. Such doctrines based on man's emotional hatred and biases, and not reason cannot await the uprising of an antipodal force to moderate its evil and ultimately, do not benefit society. Under the policy of absolute tolerance, such doctrines if unopposed, have the unbridled opportunities to breed and prosper only to hurt humanity. It is analogous to letting an heinous criminal run free on the account that he will meet up with a compellingly humane person who will show him a better way to live. The policy of absolute tolerance's greatest benefit to society may be in the fact, each and every person may be able to state his/her beliefs regardless of how deviant from the norm it may be and that such freedoms lead to self-determinism. The abstract right is an end in itself. Mill's argument is undoubtably superb; however, he fails to address the problem of human avarice in politics and consider all the factors in reality which are not readily accountable in theory.

Obama's Inauguration: Tears for Justice

2009-01-20T17:46:00.007-05:00

I've been crying all day long -- off and on. I was not feeling emotional prior to turning on the TV and watching the Obamas walk into the inauguration. I realized that an African American man was going to become President. This was a pivotal historical moment, and I felt very proud of it. I sobbed through his taking of the oath. I cried watching the interviews of several older African Americans recalling some very ugly moments of their life under Jim Crow laws. There is so much grief in acknowledging the legacy of slavery and systemic racism; and then there is so much pride in the recognition that we as a nation are capable of so much more. For them and for me, today was an impossible dream.

That Obama's taking of the presidential oath to protect and defend the Constitution was real, unlike his predecessor's taking of the same. That the U.S. Constitution states that all men are created equal somehow is NOT hallow rhetoric today and for that, I cry. Like many other African Americans before him, Obama is standing upon the shoulders of giants. That a person of color could ascend to power based on merit, hard work, character and intelligence is true today. It isn't just a lofty ideal or poetic rhetoric politicans recite in public, but that we can believe would be reality. Although I am not African American, I as an Asian American have experienced the barbs of racism and I know that it hurts. That's all you have to understand in order to cry at this historic moment. You don't have to be African American to understand that.

Obama's personal experiences have made him very worldly. He is very broad-minded and knows the ideological danger in thinking that everyone should think and believe in the same values and morals, which is what the Christian right wants. I'm just thrilled to have a president who has lived in different cultures and has a multi-racial family. I am sure that these factors have shaped his worldview. He knows that the whole world isn't Christian, English-speaking and has coffee and a bagel for breakfast. Some people worship cows and speak Hindi; some people have congee and chicken feet for breakfast. So many Americans are xenophobic; if any man can break through some of that xenophobia, it'll be Obama. I hope he will advance the cultural competency movement.

Alternatives 2008 - the Largest National Annual Conference of People Diagnosed with Mental Illnesses

2008-10-22T14:42:00.016-04:00

Much to my surprise, 100% of the completed film evaluations were favorable of the 33-min rough cut that we showed at this conference. One man from Boston University, Derek Fulker got up and told me that it was brilliant. Many said the film was "powerful." Even the best films get a few negative reviews, but this audience of mostly people diagnosed with mental illnesses were enthusiastic and enamored with our little film. That felt good after receiving so many rejection letters from foundations for funding.

In May, I submitted a workshop proposal entitled "What Are the Issues for Asian American Consumers? Asian Americans Speak." to the National Empowerment Center's Alternatives 2008 conference. Alternatives is the largest annual national conference for people with mental illnesses. It got accepted, but I didn't think we would end up going because we didn't have the funding to go. But the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors (NASMHPD) stepped up to pay for the travel expenses for me and 2 consumer speakers: Nami Roberts of Los Angeles, and the film subject, Can Truong. Thank goodness. NASMHPD is a $7million organization funded mostly by the government.

I initiated this workshop because there is a gross lack of social activism among Asian Americans on this issue, and to compound the problem, the mainstream consumer movement perceives APIAs as model minorities so they do not see any need for change. The mainstream consumer movement is a wonderful, group of people who have been diagnosed and treated by a psychiatrist, some of whom have been mistreated, locked up, coerced to take medications against their will and suffered numerous adverse side effects from psychotropic meds.

After the workshop, I submitted the following report to NASMHPD per their request.

BRIEF SUMMARY OF WORKSHOP

Walter Shwe, as the lead presenter, moderated the workshop. I spoke as an activist and filmmaker and delved into the reasons why I had begun this film project. I am not a consumer, but I am a family member of a consumer. However, I felt like I was speaking on behalf of the thousands of Asian Americans living with a mental illness who are limited-English proficient (LEP) whose needs sometimes go unaddressed by the English-speaking majority in the mental health establishment. And because a conference like Alternatives is monolingual, it unwittingly, passively excludes many Asian Americans, whose first language is not English.

I was reluctant to speak about my personal experience as a family member of a consumer because my family is not comfortable with my speaking publicly about the mental illness in my family, but I felt it was an important story to tell. In the end, I did feel that telling my grandfather's story was somewhat cathartic to my own personal process and had an important social message to the consumer movement: be aware that LEP people have rights under Title VI of the U.S. Civil Rights Act. The federal government is NOT supposed to discriminate on the basis of national origin.

I had a grandfather with chronic paranoid schizophrenia who lived in a public home for the mentally ill in Richmond, VA. Though he was a limited-English proficient (LEP) naturalized American citizen and was a Medicaid and SSDI recipient which made him eligible for an Korean-English interpreter as guaranteed to him under Title VI of the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964, he was not provided one at anytime during his medical treatment for a period of 10 years. He passed away in 2001. He often did not receive the medical attention he needed because of his inability to communicate accurately his bodily sensations to the staff of the home he resided in. His caretakers at the home denied this, perhaps because the search for and the costs of finding an Korean-English interpreter in Richmond, VA was too daunting a task for them to undertake.

My family essentially abandoned him after a series of hardships taking care of him. His bizarre delusions and inexplicable behaviors profoundly embarrassed my grandmother and jeopardized her reputation in Korean social circles. They divorced and my grandmother did little to provide care for his serious and chronic medical condition after their divorce. Because my grandmother and mother did not understand mental illness, they forbade me and my siblings from having any contact with him. Regardless, my sister and I sought to help him and called him every once in a while.

Though my grandfather did speak some English, he was not able to express the nuances of his thoughts and feelings in great detail in English. He had some English only speaking friends in his home. But sadly, he had no friends with him he could speak Korean with for the last 7 or 8 years of his life. Title VI of the U.S. Civil Rights Act states that the Federal government cannot discriminate on the basis of national origin. Providing services exclusively in English to LEP recipients of federal funding is discrimination and many people do not seem to be aware of that fact. It wasn't until I called the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund in New York City, did I find out his rights had been violated. It seems that most lawyers are not aware of the rights of LEP Americans. Most consumers are not. Most mental health directors do not. In that regard, I felt speaking on this issue was important in raising the issues because there are probably thousands of LEP recipients of federal funds who have experienced discrimination.

The purpose of creating this workshop "What Are the Issues for Asian Americans? Asian Americans Speak" was to help create an Asian American presence at Alternatives, the largest annual national conference of people with mental illnesses, where Asian Americans (AA) are grossly underrepresented. Among all the ethnic groups in the U.S., Asian Americans are the least likely to seek treatment for mental illnesses. When AAs do enter the mental health system, they are far more severely decompensated than their non-Asian counterparts according to many studies. This indicates that mental health treatment is often delayed for as long as many years for many AAs with serious and chronic mental illnesses.

The absence of grassroots activism on this issue is a serious detriment for progress in Asian American mental health. Currently, there exists no national movement of Asian American consumers and family members. There are few AAs in the country who are open about their mental illness. The model minority myth, the perception that AAs are socio-economically and academically successful and have few, if any, problems, is pervasive in the consumer movement. This myth is further reinforced by absence and invisibility of Asian Americans at these major consumer events -- supporting a false perception that AAs do not have mental illnesses. The truth is the AAs have about the same rates of mental illnesses as non-Asian groups, but they are far more adept at concealing their mental illnesses due to the harsh stigma that often brands the entire family in traditional Asian cultures and the moral code of family honor that forbids them from publicly disclosing their mental illness. The stereotypes of AAs abound in American popular culture and the consumer movement. There is no counterforce to mitigate the notion that Asian Americans don't have any problems.

The prevalence of these stereotypes and covert, subtle forms of unintentional racism sometimes, but not always, makes it uncomfortable for many AA consumers to attend Alternatives alone without the support of other AAs. Among 749 attendees this year, there were less than 10 AAs (I counted 8, but added 2 as a margin of error. I contacted NEC for exact numbers, but have not yet received a response.) though AAs comprise 4% of the American general population. Our workshop and NASMHPD were responsible for bring 4 of these AAs. Our presence at Alternatives was critical to raising awareness and creating a voice for Asian American consumers.This workshop is the beginning of an effort to create a vocal, cohesive and viable grassroots movement around the issues that confront Asian American consumers, their families, friends and allies. It's not enough to make a film, but also make the ground fertile for a movement to take root and grow. It is my hope that this workshop is one of the seminal gatherings of Asian American consumers to meet and forge bonds so that they can feel empowered to work in their home communities.

Shooting at Northern Illinois University

2008-02-16T13:29:00.002-05:00

This was the fourth campus shooting in a week!!! That is just absurd. You know, people, unfortunately, rush to judgment about people with mental illnesses based on media coverage of these incidents. Whenever you hear about a person with mental illness in the media, it's usually a result of some act of destruction and mayhem. Sadly, this deluge of TV, radio, and news coverage imprints into people's brains the association between mental illness and violence. So the stigma of mental illness persists even among highly educated segments of the population.

In Europe and many other parts of the world, where there are schizophrenics, they don't have 4 campus shootings a week. These tragedies are symptomatic of serious underlying societal problems that are specific to the US, such as the power of big pharma, the poor quality of "treatment" for people with mental illness, the horrible side effects of psychotropics, the FDA's lack of supervision of Big Pharma, the lack of universal healthcare, gun control, the lack of trust in social relations such to the competitive nature of our culture, and the outfall of capitalism. You will see that in many European nations where there is socialized healthcare, you don't hear about these kinds of shootings in all of Europe. If there are any, it's very rare. The discrimination against people with mental illness also leads consumers into isolation.

Jumping Hurdles and Recanting

2008-01-30T19:03:00.001-05:00

I know it's been forever since I wrote anything in this blog, but now I'm committed and keeping up this blog because I think my journey through this project has been many jumps over Olympian hurdles. It's been life-changing in both positive and negative ways. Positive in that I have never had so many people, some of whom I have known for many years, come up to me and tell me about their struggles with mental illness. It has opened up a whole new life to me. Negative — in the stresses that this project has brought on in my life.

Much has been uncovered since the Virginia Tech massacres — including the revelation that Asian Americans are the least likely to seek treatment for mental health issues. Many articles have cropped up citing the statistics, which of course every one in AA mental health had already knew for decades. Only when there's murder and mayhem to substantiate it, do such statistics get much attention. Another revelation was that Seung-hui Choi was, in fact, treated by an art therapist as a youngster. His parents, despite the cultural injunctions again it, were conscientious enough to send him to proper treatment, which is commendable on their part. I am sure that they must have suffered through the maze questions and decisions when their son was identified with his diagnosis of selective mutism and possibly other unidentified mental health issues. I do not know if his parents were provided with culturally sensitive mental health providers who spoke their language and was sensitive to cultural differences is another issue. Some mainstream mental health providers without any cross cultural training can actually do more harm than good. The fact that Seung-hui was treated does not mean that he was helped unfortunately, because good therapists are a rarity. And good culturally competent therapists are even rarer.

I am sure that I will get criticized for saying this — many Korean parents do not recognize mental health issues in their children or in themselves — despite this statement being true. Denial is not knowing because to acknowledge it would be deadly painful. You know what I'm here to break through the defenses of denial and fight for the truth to emerge. I'm not going to be popular for speaking the truths soon. Many Korean-American groups have rallied to say that the massacre caused by Choi is NOT a Korean issue. I can in general agree with that, especially since the event was an intersection of several socio-political issues such as gun control, lack of healthcare resources in colleges, the stigma of mental illness and rise of violence in the U.S. It is an Asian issue insofar as there is some overlap with Asian American socio-cultural phenomena such as the lack of awareness about mental health issues in Asian American combined with the harsh stigma of mental illness. The issue of denial and shame within the Asian American community IS our issue and must be dealt with. To the extent, Seung-hui may not have been given the quality care and attention that he very much needed and deserved because of linguistic and cultural barriers that have been documented by the 2001 Surgeon General's Report and the President's New Freedom Commission. The fact that

I think, I too, am guilty of jumping the gun and instantly assuming that Seung-hui was another victim of this blanket denial of mental illness in Asian American communities. I apologize for my blunder, but unfortunately, I have witnessed firsthand many Korean families hiding the relative with mental illness. My Chinese friend in LA told me an elder in her Chinese church was hiding her son with mental illness in the basement (this is not a metaphor; I mean literally in the basement.). Frightening stories of Asian Americans with mental illness abound in our communities. And I mistakenly was convinced that Seung-hui Choi's family was another that denied their family member the treatment and attention they desperately needed and deserved. Mea culpa.

Responses to my letter about the Virginia Tech Murders

2007-04-22T02:31:00.000-04:00

Today I received several emails from across the country, thanking me for writing the above letter about Asian American mental health. 2 of them were from Asian American women with mental illnesses. One of them Korean Am. She told me she was very touched by my article and knew exactly what I was talking about. It's such a Korean thing that I often wonder if non-Asians can comprehend what I'm talking about because I doubt the power of words to convey the emotional reality of culture. Well anyways, she went through a period of depression and suicidal thinking and her parents and friends gave up on her. She said that the thinking is the "Asian mentality" and it's difficult to do anything about it.

I had sent the email to a yahoo activists group; and apparently, it was sent all over the U.S. because I got emails from chiefs of mental health organizations in Hawaii. Someone from the Indiana government asked me if she could send my email to policymakers in her state. I marvel at the speed of communication with the internet. If only we could harness it more for social movements of the people.

The Virginia Tech Murders and Its Implications

2007-04-22T01:05:00.001-04:00

I originally wrote the letter below to a group of Asian American activists urging change. Now I share it with you my friends.
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As I grieve and reflect about the tragic events at Virginia Tech, I wanted to share some thoughts.

It is my hope that our community leaders go further than seeking superficial answers to this tragedy. Clearly, it not only raises the issue of gun control, but also illustrates what happens when necessary mental health interventions fail to happen. Based on what I have read in the press, it is very likely that Seung-hui Cho suffered from mental illness without receiving the proper care and attention he very desperately needed. There were many socio-cultural factors in motion that aided and abetted these failures, beginning with the collective denial and shame surrounding the issue of mental illness in Asian American communities.

Unfortunately, as a Korean-American, I know all too well what some Korean Americans with mental illness have to go through. My step grandfather suffered from paranoid schizophrenia for decades before his death in 2001. My sister and I were the only family members who sought to help him as he became helpless and deteriorated both physically and mentally. Most of his other family members wanted nothing to do with him. His own brother who coincidentally lived in the same town, Centreville, VA, as Seung-hui Cho, ruthlessly abandoned him. I can only speculate what Seung-hui with his emotional difficulties might have gone through in that Korean community.

The stigma of mental illness in traditional Korean society brands all the members of the family in the eyes of the community. "Chae-myun," which loosely translates into family honor or pride, is to be maintained at all costs. In certain situations, it is more honorable to commit suicide than to expose something shameful about their family. It is an unspoken code of honor, steeped in Confucian morality. Though some Korean families have become more Americanized living in the states, some families, I have heard, hide their kin with mental illness and even denying their existence. Several studies report that Asian Americans exhibit more severe disturbances compared to non-Asians, suggesting that they are more likely to endure psychiatric distress for a long time, only coming to the attention of the mental health system at the point of acute breakdown and crisis.

And unfortunately, because of the violent nature of Seung-hui's acts, this tragedy reinforces the stigma and negative stereotypes of people with mental illnesses. The fact remains that the vast majority of people with mental illnesses are not violent and this case is, indeed, an isolated one. 48%, nearly half the American population, will experience a mental health issue during their lifetime. 1 out of every 4 Americans experiences a mental health issue during any given year. Most experience anxiety and depressive disorders, and are for the most part pretty harmless. The most aberrant and violent cases receive the most media coverage and, regrettably, are the cases that leave the deepest impression.

In our communities, leaders do not want to talk about this issue because it makes people feel uncomfortable. In order to instigate the dialogue about this taboo subject, I have been working on a film about mental illness in the Asian American communities for 2 years. When I bring up the subject, some people visibly become ill at ease, and change the subject. No matter how evident the signs of mental health issues are, it seems that certain people rather sweep the elephant under the rug and pretend that it doesn't exist. I hope that community leaders will address this issue now that the herd of elephants has stampeded out from under the rug and the model minority cover has been blown. I hope that there is something the Asian American community can take away from this horrific event that will forever be etched into the American consciousness. The time to break the silence is long overdue. We lost the beautiful and beloved Iris Chang to suicide because of this silence. And unfortunately, she is one of many Asian American women who take their lives every year.

There have been many mental health tragedies in the Asian American community; none with the exception of Iris Chang's suicide that have received the barrage of mass publicity that this massacre has. Why? Because most of these people weren't harmful to others, only to themselves. Elizabeth Shin, Anna Guo, my step grandfather, Hyon Joon Shin, and many, many college suicides, most recently at Stanford, to name a few. Elizabeth Shin who had a history of psychiatric problems died by fire under ambiguous circumstances in a MIT dormitory. 14-year-old Anna Guo was shot 3 times by the Ventura County police while she was attempting to commit suicide. (As strange and contradictory as that sounds, it is true) My step grandfather who was limited-English proficient died because his caretakers failed to understand he needed emergency help in part due to the language barrier. Sometimes I wish Asian American mental health had an advocate like Al Sharpton who would incite the crowds for the cause, fearlessly wreak havoc every time an mental health tragedy occurred and point fingers at all the potentially guilty parties, whether it's the government, the culture, the neighborhood or the family, leaving no stone unturned. We need someone to be vocal, even if obnoxiously and impetuously, as long as he or she didn't remain silent. You heard it first in the AIDS campaigns, but it also applies here: silence equals death. Whether you are an activist or an apathetic, a parent or child, an Asian or Caucasian, young or old, healthy or ill, as long as you are just another breathing, living human being, don't be complicit in the conspiracy of silence. Please talk about the huge elephants under the rug and don't look the other way. And conspire to create hope.

There are many things that could be done at a policy level. Two of the largest mental health advocacy organizations are headquartered in Arlington, VA, not too far from where Seung-hui Cho grew up. They incidentally do not offer many programs geared toward people of color. Though we live in a multi-cultural society, most establishment mental health organizations are Euro-American-centric even when the social need exists among other ethnic groups. Even though Asian American women 15-24 have the second highest suicide rate in the nation (Native American women have the highest) and Asian American women over 65 have 10 times the risk of suicide as their white counterparts, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention is ninety-something percent white in their staff and the support programs that they offer. The model minority myth has worked against Asian Americans in nearly every arena of mental health. The facts tell a different story from the overall perception that we have few, if any, problems.

Based on Seung-hui Cho’s creative writing samples exposed in the press, I think he may have been a victim of some heinous abuse. This is purely speculative, but a valid hypothesis based on the scant facts presented in his case. In both his plays, the protagonists are sexually abused by a figure of authority and want to kill their abuser in a macabre manner. This kind of intense rage is consistent with that which I have seen among sexual abuse survivors. Mr. Cho, if in fact was abused, probably never dealt with what had happened to him. When victims go without expressing their grief and pain over the abuse they suffered, they will most inevitably become perpetrators.

Had Seung-hui sought counseling or psychiatric help, he probably would not have received help from a therapist with whom he could have forged genuine trust. Most therapists in this country are trained in Western psychology, which is based on individualism and existentialistic theories, with little meaningful exposure to Asian American cultures. With that kind of academic background and clinical training with primarily Euro-American patients, most therapists are ill-equipped to understand Confucian culture and the emotional experience of walking the fine line between 2 very different cultures which is what most Korean Americans have to do. Often times, when there is a cross-cultural relationship in therapy, the patient who is from the minority culture actually has to adapt to the therapist's culture if it is the more dominant one of the society they live in. Most mental health graduate programs offer little, if any kind of training, in culturally competency. To further exacerbate the issue, there is a grave shortage of bi-cultural, bilingual mental health professionals that some Asian American mental health organizations have resorted to training bilingual paraprofessionals. Even though we model minority Asian Americans are entering med schools in droves and comprise 25% of the medical doctors in this country, proportionally fewer Asian Americans are entering psychiatry than other medical specialties because the stigma of mental illness. And the fact that a clinican is Asian American does not make him or her culturally competent to work with Asian Americans. Because of their Western-biased academic and clinical training, they are often taught to treat Euro-American patients. Furthermore, some Asian Americans have internalized the racism they have experienced in larger society and, consequently, will oppress other Asian Americans who don't conform to Euro-American cultural norms. For example, if they grew up among peers who taunted them for not speaking English or eating "weird" foods like kimchee without properly working through those traumas, they may insist that other immigrant Asian Americans speak English and eat Euro-American foods. The lack of culturally competent care has consequences not only for Asian Americans, but for all of society.

As far as Cho is concerned, there remains many unanswered questions. And any analysis on my part and the pundits of this very complex case is pure speculation. That fact doesn’t seem to deter the experts who never met Cho from diagnosing him posthumously. They say he was a sociopath; another expert says he was probably a paranoid schizophrenic, like my step grandfather. If in fact he suffered from paranoid delusions like my step grandfather, he surely must have been a tormented soul because this disease grips the mind like vise and doesn’t let go. But unlike Cho, my step grandfather, Hyon Joon Shin left this world namelessly without harming a soul. Most of his days living in the Bellamy Home for Adults in Richmond, VA were spent being scared, sitting, sometimes pacing, quietly being suspicious of people around him. He was more like a 5-year-old who needed to be comforted constantly, than the 63-year-old man that he was. Dosages of Haldol diminished, but did not eradicate, his delusional beliefs that the CIA was chasing him and that the tap water was poisonous. He restlessly lived in this delusional world nearly all of his waking hours until one warm Spring morning, when he was found dead in his sleep. The night before I had urged the administrator of the home to take my grandfather to the hospital because he had told me that he couldn't breathe. Mr. Bellamy responded to me in disbelief and told me that my grandfather appeared fine. Though I was saddened by his death and troubled life, I hoped that he finally found the peace he so deserved.