film

 Day 917

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Entertainment or murder?

Screen Shot 2017-04-30 at 12.35.22The Blue Whale ‘suicide game’ is believed to be an online social media game which is encouraging people to kill themselves. An administrator assigns daily tasks, such as self-harming, watching horror films and waking up at unusual hours. The tasks get progressively more extreme which the members have to complete for 50 days. On the last day, they are instructed to end their life.

130 teenage deaths in Russia between November 2015 and April 2016 have been linked to this game. Yulia Konstatinova, 15, joined her friend Veronica in jumping from the roof of a 14-storey block of flats. She left a note saying ‘End’ on her social media page after she posted a picture of a big blue whale. The game is making inroads into Europe. Teenagers in Portugal, Devon and Cornwall have been found to have accessed it.

It must take a certain special kind of a sick mind to create ‘games’ like this.

’13 Reasons why’ is a Netflix series about a teenage girl’s perplexing suicide followed by tapes to unravel the mystery of her tragic death. The haunting images in it and the traumatic content is inciting self-harm within the teenage community. It is highly controversial to introduce such material into the media.

Both the above are perfect examples of everything that goes against suicide prevention best practices in the media. They are intense and they romanticise suicide.

Parents beware. Young minds, be ware.

Ref:

Blue Whale:
https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/3003805/blue-whale-suicide-game-online-russia-victims/

13 reasons why:
https://www.netflix.com/in/title/80117470

Day 913

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Till date I wonder what it must have been like for Saagar, to be diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder and to be on Psychiatric medications. I have read books, watched documentaries and films to gain an understanding of it and I think I have an idea but maybe I have absolutely no clue.

Watching a clip of Paul Dalio, a young man living with Bipolar disorder and a film director brought clarity in 2 and a half minutes.

“When you get diagnosed, you go from experiencing what you’re certain is divine illumination. After sometime in it, you’re thrown into a hospital, you’re pumped full of drugs, you come down 60 pounds overweight, completely disoriented and they tell you, ”No, there was nothing divine. Nothing illuminating. You have just triggered a lifelong genetic illness which will swing you from psychotic highs to suicidal lows and you’ll probably fall into the 1 in 4 statistic unless you take the medication which makes you feel no emotion. If you imagine missing feeling sad, it’s the only thing worse than pain.”
So, it’s very hard for people to comprehend.

After a lifetime of building your identity, your place within humanity, you’re suddenly told that you are a defect of humanity. And to know that you’re not going to be the person you used to be and that you’ll at best be able to get by is … is life shattering. And the only labels you have to choose from are some kind of a disorder, Manic-depressive or Bipolar. So you scrape through every clinical book  trying to look for answers. That’s exactly what I did. Peeling through these books which were these diagnostic, medical texts where I felt like I was under a microscope and someone in a lab coat was judging me.”

Paul Dalio came across a book by Kay Redfield Jamison who is a world authority on Bipolar Disorder by way of having the illness and being a Professor in Psychiatry. The book is called “Touched with Fire”. He went on to write and direct a film by the same name.

Ref:
Paul Dalio:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUnkt7M-GCM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jr7vi4wLJI8
Film Trailer: