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Mental Poison Dispenser
As an aspiring novelist. I read my fair share of books on how to amaze readers with my prose. Time and again the writing instructors say that if you want to write a best-seller, you’ve got to fill your novel with page after page of conflict.
Translation: if you ever hope to rise above the poverty line as a selling novelist, the industry demands that you make your protagonists squirm. Make ‘em suffer. Make ‘em miserable.
The flip side of that writing advice that I seldom see talked about is the psychological impact all that manufactured conflict has on readers. The same, of course, can be said for movie-goers and TV viewers because screenwriters work with the same advice to sell their screenplays.
Translation: the media that you ingest as an entertainment consumer has been created and produced to give you the vicarious thrill of watching someone suffer conflict. It is a formula built into the system.
TV sucks
I enjoyed watching This Emotional Life on PBS. It was a six-hour documentary on human emotions shown over three days.
In the second episode there was a scene where a young woman was being treated for severe depression. She was being given an evolved variation of the shock treatment that was made such a vision of evil in movies like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. According to the documentary the technique has progressed greatly and it has been scientifically shown that this therapy actually stimulates the re-growth of brain cells in the part of the brain where depression has reduced brain cells.
But the thing that got to me was that when the young patient came home from the hospital after her therapy treatments, she would park herself in front of the TV and zone out.
Let’s make sure you got that. In front of the TV!
I was startled to see that and wondered why the medical community didn’t have some alternatives for people undergoing treatment for depression.
