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Jolly good
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Join Date: Oct 2002
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Jolly good
Join Date: Oct 2002
Posts: 29,141
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Mental health charity founder slams Big Brother
Quote:
Big Brother: Worse than bear baiting
by MARJORIE WALLACE, founder and chief executive of the mental health charity SANE
08:22am 1st June 2006
Anorexia, confused sexuality, Tourette's and even suicidal depression.
Five of Big Brother's contestants show acute psychological problems. MARJORIE WALLACE asks if this is the sickest TV show ever...
Victorians flocked to Barnum and Bailey's freak show to see a little girl called Krao whose body was entirely covered in thick black hair. Poor Krao suffered from a medical condition we now know as hypertrichosia.
She was well-educated and spoke several languages, but the crowds who stared and pointed believed she was half-human, half-animal. They thought she did not care about being the subject of taunting and ridicule.
A century of progress later, the producers responsible for the 21st-century freak show we call Channel 4's Big Brother should know better than to exploit human frailty for the purpose of entertainment.
But their treatment of people facing mental health problems in the latest series suggests they do not. Big Brother contestants such as the apparently anorexic Nikki Grahame and Lea Walker, who has body dysmorphic disorder (a condition in which the patient becomes preoccupied with a non-existent or minimal cosmetic defect), are being exploited in a deeply disturbing fashion.
When I was a psychology student in the 1960s, behavioural experiments were all the rage. Since the 1920s, when the Russian physiologist Ivan Petrovich Pavlov proved that you could drive a dog over the edge, by conditioning it to expect one thing and offering another, there has been widespread interest in seeing how much stress animals - and human beings - can take.
We also wanted to know what humans could tolerate before going mad or becoming deeply depressed. We quickly found that randomly rewarding or punishing learned tasks is the quickest way to turn a cat that would normally choose milk into an alcoholic, and a lively hamster into a ball of despair.
Another favourite subject at that time was sleep deprivation. Human guinea pigs would be kept awake to see how well they could perform a series of tasks.
Then there was sensory deprivation. Students were placed in tiny cubicles, deprived of all visual and aural stimuli, until they became totally disoriented. These experiments in creating neurosis are similar to techniques used in military interrogation when the need to extract information is urgent.
There is not a lot of difference between these psychological experiments of my youth and the manipulations being imposed on the current Big Brother contestants.
And the trouble with Big Brother is that, far from helping scientific research or obtaining information, the experiment taking place is being masterminded for entertainment alone. Financial greed and viewer ratings are the driving forces.
Meanwhile, the contestants are being exploited to win the unthinking attention of viewers.
The sad thing is that the experience of watching mentally fragile people being tested to breaking point not only causes potential psychological damage to them, but to the viewers as well. Paying customers at those Victorian freak shows left degraded as well as entertained. So did the spectators who cheered as slave gladiators were thrown into the Roman arena to be torn to pieces.
Behaving like voyeurs of other people's confusion and distress may bring short-term gratification, but in the long term it, too, can be corrupting.
Children may be lured into believing that the sight of people under mental duress is harmless fun. The truth is that viewers of all ages are having their sensitivities to genuine human suffering blunted.
I do not want to be a killjoy or a nanny. We are told that contestants have volunteered to appear. Some may genuinely find that a moment of fame can restore lost self-esteem.
The fact that someone has a history of mental health problems certainly should not deprive them of their hour in the limelight. Being vulnerable should never deny anybody their moment on stage.
We are also aware that Big Brother's producer, Endemol, employs a screening process to choose contestants and that a psychologist is on hand to counsel them. It is not known how rigorous that process is. What we do know is that this is an extremely risky business.
Assessing who is, or is not, at risk in the conditions created inside the Big Brother house would take years and great skill. The techniques required to do it properly simply do not fit with the production schedule of a primetime TV show.
Eminent psychiatrists admit that they cannot gauge with certainty whether such exposure will be good for their patients. It is extremely difficult to predict who will benefit and who will become a casualty.
The kind of triggers that precipitate illnesses such as anorexia include feelings of failure, not living up to expectations and social rejection. We know that refusing food can be a last-resort means of controlling a frightening world.
But these are precisely the types of emotion being elicited for public delectation by the Big Brother experience. What could be worse than being thrown out of the house when you are already desperate for acceptance by your peers?
And we are talking here about life-0threatening damage. We are led to believe that two of the contestants in the present series have attempted suicide before. We know that the best predictor for 'completed suicide' is evidence of previous attempts - i.e. that people who have previously tried to kill themselves are more likely than others to take their own lives. Big Brother's producers need to be very careful, for they are playing with people's lives.
Then there is the problem of what happens after the show is over. Every performer knows that sudden sinking feeling that occurs as the adrenaline begins to dissipate and the applause fades. How much more agonising is that for a person who has failed to achieve their dreams of fame or whose ambition to be a celebrity has ended in ridicule and trial by newspaper headline?
Big Brother contestants are given access to a showbusiness consultant, but such advice on how to profit from their exposure cannot begin to substitute for the support that ejected contestants will naturally need.
Only the most mentally robust among us can handle such extremes of emotion and the pain of being forgotten.
In previous series, Big Brother has pushed to breaking point the boundaries of taste with displays of explicit sexual behaviour, drinking and verbal abuse that have offended many viewers. Despite this, millions have tuned in to watch the antics of previous contestants such as Jade Goody, Kate Lawler and George Galloway MP.
However, playing with the minds and lives of people at risk, as the present series does, is a very different and much more dangerous game.
"We don't want to see people who need help, and who seek help, being made fools of in public," says Alan Jamieson, deputy chief executive of the British Association For Counselling And Psychotherapy.
At SANE, we receive hundreds of calls every week from people struggling to keep a tenuous hold on their minds, people who are living perilously close to the edge.
We just hope that identifying with the "on- screen traumas" of the Big Brother contestants will not push too many of them closer to the precipice.
Mental health is too serious and sensitive to be exploited for cheap enjoyment.
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01-06-2006, 11:59 AM
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