Mental Health and Public Relations

One of the primary problems in presenting mental health issues to the public is that there are two very different problems combined under the same heading. On the one hand, "mental health" is about the seriously impaired people with various forms of schizophrenia who need support and medication simply to survive. On the other hand are the people with depressions and anxiety disorders; as many as 35% of the population (or more) will experience one or more episodes of these disorders. Lumping them together in the same category is like treating cancer and pneumonia as equivalent.

People with depression and anxiety don't want to be lumped into the same category as the people they read about in the paper who have hallucinations and delusions or who are so impaired they can't survive without help. The more dramatic images and news stories are about such people. Movies about mental health, no matter how well intentioned, focus on the dramatic and the disturbed: "The Snake Pit", "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest", "Fatal Attraction" and the like come to mind.

People with depression and anxiety are just us; our disorders are not generally permanent nor disabling and we don't want to be thought of as "nut cases". We look and (for the most part) function just like everyone else. There are a lot of us. We all know people who have depressions and anxiety disorders, and they look like us because they are us. We/They don't want to be thought about as "insane" or "mentally ill". And that makes it hard for them to decide to get treatment. Many people with depression or anxiety never get the treatment they need because of the stigma. They may spend years enduring their discomfort simply hoping to "get better" by themselves, and many of them eventually do, but at the cost of greatly extended discomfort and limited function.

While we say we don't want to stigmatize the "mentally ill", nobody thinking about getting treatment for depression wants their employer to find out they have a "mental health history". Depressions and anxiety disorders, no matter how common, are not considered as simply illnesses; no matter what we say, we don't treat people with a history of mental illness like others. If people find out that you were treated for depression or anxiety, you may be refused a job. You lose any chance at political office. In the military you are eventually dumped, especially if you are an officer. Insurance companies in the past have refused to insure you or provide funds for your treatment.

My point here is that we treat these two very different classes of mental illness as if they were the same. Treatment for each group is very different. Schizophrenias and bipolar disorders are chronic illnesses which cannot, at the present, be cured. At best they can be ameliorated. Anxiety and depression are curable, for the most part, and have no long-term consequences. It seems to me that we need to see these groups of disorders as very different and separate.

Perhaps it would be best to separate these categories into "Mental Illness" and "Emotional Difficulty". They really are quite different.

Film color casts

Many of the reviews of the several available films make reference to "color cast" of the film. Ektar, for instance, is said to emphasize warm colors more than Velvia. This has always been true of films, and back in the days when we had to have them printed by professionals it mattered more than it does now. We were pretty much stuck with how the print came out, although when I printed my own color prints I was accustomed to changing the filtration to adjust color. Of course that is time consuming in the extreme; you can't know how a change in filtration has affected a print until after it was developed.

With computers we can see on the screen how the picture will look when printed, and we can instantly make changes to suit our own tastes. So it no longer matters what colors are "favored" by a particular film. I have Photoshop. I can adjust it any way I like. What matters most now are the sharpness of the film and its range of shading (or shadow/bright detail). I don't care how contrasty or not the film is, if the detail is present I can adjust the contrast just as I can the color. But I can't easily fix poor detail, especially in the shadows.

When I finish running my tests I will probably post results and samples of enlarged detail to this blog. Gotta say, though, dragging three heavy cameras (or 2 heavy and one light), the tripod, a spot-meter and minor odds and ends is kinda heavy going. So far I've really enjoyed returning to film shooting. I'd forgotten the pleasures of taking pictures thoughtfully and carefully, rather than just shooting a bunch and throwing away the obvious losers. It's a little harder to grab a shot with my Rollei, because I have to use the spotmeter to calculate the f/stops and shutter speed separately, then dial them in. However, different cameras for different uses; I wouldn't use the Rollei for action photos anyway. The Pentax 645 is plenty quick and fairly simple to operate (compared to the Canon 5D). I'd use the Canon for people shooting, lower natural light, indoor work, and save the Rollei for landscapes and other scenics.

Anybody else out there testing this idea out?