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Films are being used as a tool by therapists to help patients explore their psyche, writes
Can cinema reach beyond its physical limitations to cure a mental malady? In India, where psychiatric treatment is considered to be a clandestine, hush-hush affair, one cannot answer this question. A mentally challenged person is generally not spoken about in public. The family mostly looks upon this person as a social embarrassment. If cinema can really be therapeutic, then it can be used at least as a coping mechanism if not as a cure. Actor Anupam Kher is actively involved with the Dilkhush Foundation, an organisation for mentally challenged children in Mumbai. He visits them once a week and talks and plays with them. They are entertained with films. After each screening, "you must see them thrilled to bits," he informs. Anupam did a brilliant enactment of a man slowly slipping into dementia in a recent film Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Mara. Can the screening of this film at old age homes and homes for people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease help them cope with their situation? It would spread awareness about the disease even if it cannot effect a cure, considering that there is no known cure yet for Alzheimer’s. An increasing number of therapists in the US prescribe movies to help their patients explore their psyches. Some of them have tried to package their practices around cinema therapy. Cinema, like art, books, and music, is becoming one more tool to help those in therapy achieve goals and overcome hurdles. Books with titles like Rent Two Films and Let’s Talk in the Morning and Cinematherapy for Lovers: The Girl’s Guide to Finding True Love, One Movie at a Time have found their niche in the self-help sections of bookstores. "Cinema therapy is the process of using movies made for the big screen or television for therapeutic purposes," says Gary Solomon, PhD, MPH, MSW, author of The Motion Picture Prescription and Reel Therapy. In, Cinema as Therapy, (Salon/Health & Body, May 27, 1999) Daniel Mangin writes, "during the early days of home video, psychoanalyst Foster Cline treated a woman whose wild and uncommunicative child resisted the slightest display of maternal affection. It occurred to the doctor that his patient might benefit from seeing how Anne Sullivan dealt with the similarly rebellious Helen Keller, so he asked her to pop The Miracle Worker into the VCR." Arthur Penn’s 1962 film about Keller and her teacher didn’t work a miracle but, according to Cline, "the client learned how to set limits with a difficult child and saw that some children need to be held whether they like it or not." He found the experiment so successful that he began to assign "video homework" to patients regularly. Today many therapists and mental-health professionals do the same. Some suggest that videos can help you even if you are not in therapy. The Miracle Worker inspired Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Black. Medical practitioners in general and psychiatrists and counsellors, in particular, could explore the possibilities of screening Black in institutions for the mentally challenged, for the physically disabled and for senior citizens in need of love and care, and this could most certainly bring home positive results. Thanks to the brilliant and realistic performance of the entire acting cast, the superb cinematography and the lovely music, Black could offer a model lesson in underscoring the importance and the significance of cinema as therapy. Late author and editor Norman Cousins in An Anatomy of Illness wrote about how he watched humorous films as part of his recovery from what had been diagnosed as terminal cancer. He found that "ten minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anaesthetic effect and would give me at least two hours of painfree sleep." There is a simple logic at work here. If violence in films can trigger violence in some sections of the viewing audience, then watching a mentally challenged person coping successfully with his challenge on screen will similarly reflect on that section of the audience that faces similar challenges. Lawsuits against Natural Born Killers and The Basketball Diaries accuse their creators of providing road maps to killers. "This is a recognition that there is some interplay between film messages and the conscious and unconscious mind. If movies are capable of doing great harm, though, it stands to reason they possess the potential to heal as well," sums up Mangin. Conducting screening experiments for the mentally challenged in India however, is not without problems. Are Indian psychiatrists prepared to take on the challenge? Should psychiatrists and psychotherapists doctor selections and viewing of films? Or should patients be let free to watch what they will or what is available? Should a pilot study be carried out before conducting such experiment? If yes, how does one go about collecting a ‘random sample’ of patients? However, the scenario in India would definitely have an edge over other countries in the world not only because we are the largest film producing country in the world, but also because we have a large section of illiterate people whose only outlet of entertainment is films and we also have a major slice of people struck by poverty who cannot afford psychiatric treatment so cinema would be an economically viable proposition as therapy.
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