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Keywords: Mental Illness

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Male spirituality in Kiwi portrait of mental illness

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 13 November 2014

    New Zealand filmmaker Robertson’s latest feature has been described as a cross between modern antipodean classics Once Were Warriors and Shine. Like Warriors, Dark Horse considers masculinity, violence and spirituality in the lives of urban Maoris. Like Shine, it offers a moving portrait of a character whose mental illness appears to be the dark reflection of esoteric, obsessive genius.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Black is the new black

    • Isabella Fels
    • 08 October 2014
    5 Comments

    I love to get dressed up in black. Glide along the street dressed top to bottom in black. I often feel like a perfect ten wearing black. It covers up all my bad features. People seem to gravitate towards me. It is as though we have something powerful in common. I feel people won’t talk badly about me behind my back dressed in black.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Society says freak show must go on

    • Michael Mullins
    • 29 September 2014
    6 Comments

    Making fun of mental illness has a long history that was reflected in plans of the Perth Royal Show to offer an amusement based on the notorious Bethlem Sanatorium in London, where residents were cruelly taunted for the sake of public amusement. The WA Agricultural Society refused to cancel the show in reponse to criticism, instead changing the theme to ‘the outbreak of a deadly contagion’, itself an inappropriate subject for public amusement.

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  • MARGARET DOOLEY AWARD

    Flawed thinking that allows us to abuse animals

    • Valerie Wangnet
    • 24 September 2014
    14 Comments

    In Ancient Greece, Hippocrates used the term 'hysteria' to account for emotional instability and mental illness in women. This is a diagnosis that survived up until the first sparks of the women's suffrage movement in mid–19th century. In the case of food animals, we are told that they cannot think, suffer or feel pain.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Inside the head of a mentally ill genius

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 19 June 2014

    Mental illness is no laughing matter. Except when it is. Frank is a musical genius, who spends his life with his face concealed inside a comically oversized head. His bandmates are in awe of him, especially starry-eyed keyboard player Jon, who in his naivety envies Frank's illness and the strange creativity that it entails. Things turn ugly when one member of the ensemble commits suicide during the recording of the band's debut album.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Homeless young people need the means to flourish

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 08 April 2014
    13 Comments

    Curing homelessness is not simply a matter of finding homes for disadvantaged people. With backgrounds of family dysfunction, broken schooling, physical and mental illness and addiction, homeless young people come to the attention of many government departments. For all the good will involved, the effect of piecemeal interventions is to confuse young people who feel themselves the object of care, not the subject of their own growth.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Australia's asylum seeker holocaust

    • Lyn Bender
    • 18 March 2014
    37 Comments

    The BBC's John Humphrys admonished Julie Bishop over the Coalition Government's off-shore processing centres, which he said 'have been described as 'breeding grounds for rape, riots, malaria and mental illness, that bear the look of concentration camps'. Alice Herz-Sommer, believed to be the oldest survivor of the Holocaust, died recently in London. Her story contains salient lessons for Australia's border protection regime.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Certified at 35

    • Isabella Fels
    • 26 February 2014
    19 Comments

    I felt less than five, little more than three. They dragged me kicking and screaming, raging into the psychiatric ward. I felt like an accident waiting to happen, a bomb about to explode. I shrank the more I talked to my shrink. I could no longer pretend I was fine. I could no longer shine. How I wished I could shrug off my illness. But it held me tight.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    We created the Manus Island danger

    • Moira Rayner
    • 20 February 2014
    38 Comments

    We created this risk, intending it to 'deter' boat people and people smugglers. As a consequence, we've created racial conflict in PNG and the collapse of the rule of law in Nauru. Now, it is surely a duty to re-evaluate a policy that leads to mental illness, destruction of property, hope, imagination and civil society, and death. I think we have a duty to refugees, because we are descended from refugees and may be refugees ourselves, one day.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    A distasteful slice of gender politics pie

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 13 February 2014
    1 Comment

    Adele is a single mother suffering the debilitating after-effects of past trauma. But her story offers no robust consideration of mental illness. In stark contrast to her male counterparts, Adele is merely pitiable and helpless, and lacks the agency to raise herself from despondency. Weakness is thus conflated with femaleness. Only the arrival of a strong, practical and violent man serves to raise her Adele from her stupor.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    A frank chat about mental illness

    • Georgina Laidlaw
    • 06 December 2013
    13 Comments

    Mental illness begets mental illness. One glance at the reportage on the Royal Commission into child sex abuse proves that. We won't discuss loved ones' mental health because to do so feels like a betrayal. We won't talk about our own mental health because what right do we have to be unhappy? But ill heath is not a right. Suffering is not indulgence. If you're telling yourself that, shut the hell up.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Trott a hero for quitting the Ashes

    • Michael Mullins
    • 02 December 2013
    2 Comments

    English batsman Jonathan Trott was pilloried in some media comments because he abandoned his team because he felt 'stressed'. We should be celebrating the fact that a high profile male sportsman finds that he can declare he has a stress-related illness and then seek help for it.

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