Summary Of The Hidden Pictures Project: A Personal Journey Into Global Mental Health
Mental health promotion is still highly misunderstood today and sometimes not looked at from a positive perspective. People can try to bring an encouraging message about mental health, but there will almost always be someone who will complain and not be satisfied with the way certain mental health characteristics or circumstances are portrayed. For the purpose of this paper, I researched The Hidden Pictures Project: A Personal Journey into Global Mental Health. The documentary shares a collective of short films to shed light on global mental health. In the documentary Hidden Pictures, Delaney Ruston journeys to India, South Africa, China, France, and the United States to discover how families around the world live with mental health illnesses.
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With a documentary like Hidden Pictures, recording the personal lives of families across the world opens up confidentiality guidelines. Once information is out there, it cannot be taken back. Before creating the film, the creators would have had to work out agreements and procedures for using personal information (McAnaney, 2008). Self-disclosing what happens behind the scenes living with a mental illness is an extremely personal part of someone’s life. it would be essential to make sure that the plan was mapped out and everything was taken into consideration. Examples would be references to certain individuals or the release of personal details. Another thought to consider would be how other people living with a mental illness take the depiction of what they are living with. For example, if the person living with anxiety in the film has certain triggers and symptoms, not every individual living with anxiety will have the same ones. Guttman shares, “Numerous dilemmas emerge when interventions aim to “do good,” but other factors might be involved that raise concerns regarding the means applied in the intervention” (2017). The Hidden Pictures Project’s goal is to do good, however making the whole world pleased is not realistic. Another ethical consideration to look at surrounding Hidden Pictures, is the cultural representations. Being a film exploring global mental health, it talks about the countries and their culture. In the trailer, a statistic about the number of people with a mental illness in developing countries is given; however, they cannot give an accurate number when an abundance of the worlds population goes undiagnosed. Unfortunately, this also means that they go without
With a documentary like Hidden Pictures, recording the personal lives of families across the world opens up confidentiality guidelines. Once information is out there, it cannot be taken back. Before creating the film, the creators would have had to work out agreements and procedures for using personal information (McAnaney, 2008). Self-disclosing what happens behind the scenes living with a mental illness is an extremely personal part of someone’s life. it would be essential to make sure that the plan was mapped out and everything was taken into consideration. Examples would be references to certain individuals or the release of personal details. Another thought to consider would be how other people living with a mental illness take the depiction of what they are living with. For example, if the person living with anxiety in the film has certain triggers and symptoms, not every individual living with anxiety will have the same ones. Guttman shares, “Numerous dilemmas emerge when interventions aim to “do good,” but other factors might be involved that raise concerns regarding the means applied in the intervention” (2017). The Hidden Pictures Project’s goal is to do good, however making the whole world pleased is not realistic. Another ethical consideration to look at surrounding Hidden Pictures, is the cultural representations. Being a film exploring global mental health, it talks about the countries and their culture. In the trailer, a statistic about the number of people with a mental illness in developing countries is given; however, they cannot give an accurate number when an abundance of the worlds population goes undiagnosed. Unfortunately, this also means that they go without