The Horror of Being Out of Control

I watched an eposide of "Law and Order" this weekend. It dealt with a girl who had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, who stopped taking her meds and left a wake of carnage in her path.

Do you know anyone with a mental illness? The real kind - where they hurt themselves or suffer from paranoia or have mood swings from really great highs to really bad lows. The kind of illness where they should be under a doctor's care or on medication. That to me is a great horror. The feeling of being out of control. If you have ever made a trip to Toronto you have likely seen someone like this on the streets - the people who are arguing with someone but there is no one standing beside them. This is often something called bipolar disorder.

Bipolar disorder affects men and women equally and usually shows up between the ages of 15 and 25. The exact cause is unknown, but it occurs more often in relatives of people with bipolar disorder.

Bipolar disorder results from disturbances in the areas of the brain that regulate mood. During manic periods, a person with bipolar disorder may be overly impulsive and energetic, with an exaggerated sense of self, the depressed phase beings overwhelming feelings of anxiety, low self-worth and suicidal thoughts.

For the most part this can be balanced with medicine but people who take these medicines will often say that the cure is worse then the illness.

I would not even begin to guess at what that must be like and am grateful that I do not have to know it first hand.

Let’s Talk Some More About Phobias

I do have a fascination with people’s responses/reactions or fear to what they perceive as danger. For many these fears translate into phobias where the fear is either irrational or excessive. In other words, their reaction is an abnormally fearful reaction to a danger that is neither real or is greatly exaggerated. I find this particularly interesting when it comes to watching people's reactions to horror or violence.

Phobias affect people of all ages, from all walks of life and in every part of the world. Statistics tracked by the American Psychiatric Institute for Research and Education report that in any given year, 7.8% of American adults have phobias. They are the most common psychiatric illness among women of all ages and are the second most common illness among men older than 25.

Phobias are emotional and physical reactions to feared objects or situations. Symptoms of a phobia typically include:

 Feelings of panic, dread, horror, or terror
 Recognition that the fear goes beyond normal boundaries and the actual threat of the danger
 Reactions that are automatic and uncontrollable, often taking over the person’s thoughts
 Rapid heartbeat, shortness of breath, trembling and an overwhelming desire to flee the situations.

Phobias are divided into categories according to the cause of the reaction and avoidance.



AGORAPHOBIA is the fear of being alone in any place or situation where it seems escape would be difficult or help unavailable. Some people can become so disabled they literally will not leave their homes. Interestingly, two-thirds of those with agoraphobia are women.

SOCIAL PHOBIA’s are categorized as people who fear being watched or humiliated while doing something in front of others. The activity involves is usually very mundane, like eating a meal. The most common social phobia is the fear of speaking in public.

SPECIFIC PHOBIA, as the name suggests deals with people who have a specific phobia reflected by an irrational fear of a specific object or situation, like spiders or of being in closed in spaces.

Any phobia that interferes with daily living should be treated and can be treated either with therapy or mediations.

So embrace those phobias and live it up.

"Scary Poppins?"

Incredible what film editing can do these days. Take a movie like Mary Poppins – I think we all know it. It’s the story of the loving magical nanny who comes to bring some fun back into children’s lives when they need it most. Well someone has done an incredible job of pulling together bits and pieces of the movie and turning it into a “trailer” for the movie only its presented as a Horror flick rather than a family fun movie. It completely loses it’s warm and fuzzy feeling and leaves you feeling just a little bit disturbed.

Have a look and see what I mean.

A Different Kind of Horror - Betrayal

There has been so much in the news these last few months about the melt-down of the financial markets. Governments are bailing out large companies who you would never have guessed in a million years would be in need of a helping hand but that is the "horror" of present day financial affairs.

A couple of items caught my attention this morning on my way out the door to school.

Bernie Madoff. Some of you may have heard of him. He is a former investment advisor, charged with the loss of $50 billion dollars (yes billion) of wealthy people's money in one of the biggest Ponzi schemes ever conceived. A Ponzi scheme is an illegal investment operation that pays returns to investors out of money paid by subsequent investors rather than from profit. Not only did he rob from his friends and wealthy business clients but he "lost" $3-million (U.S) of his sister's cash in the Ponzi scheme. And yet the man is still out on bail living in a $10 million dollar apartment in New York City.

Also heard a story about an Indiana businessman whose financial-management companies were under investigation who its alleged bailed out of his small plane and let it crash in what appears to have been an elaborate attempt to fake his own death. He let the plane crash near some homes and he was lucky no one was killed.

People's lives have become so complicated and desperate because people they trusted with their life savings have betrayed them. Betrayal is the worst kind of human horror.

Hostel Part II (The kind of terror that makes you jump)

For sheer “jump out of your skin” terror Hostel Part II delivers. This is a great video rental.

Plot: Beginning where Hostel ended, Paxton, now in seclusion with his girlfriend Stephanie, disregards her plea to report his friends' deaths. In the morning, Stephanie discovers Paxton's decapitated body in the kitchen being licked by a kitten. In Slovakia, a mysterious package is delivered to Sasha, the owner of the entire money-for-murder business that begins in the “Hostel”. In Italy, art students Beth, Whitney and Lorna are convinced by Axelle, a model they were drawing, to join her on a spa vacation. The party travels to a small Slovak village and checks into the local hostel and retires to their rooms, allowing the desk clerk time to upload their passport photos to an online auction website, where American businessman Todd bids on and wins Whitney and Beth for himself and his best friend Stuart.

What follows is a nightmare for the girls.

The Silence of the Lambs

Silence of the Lambs, another favorite film.

Plot: Young FBI agent Clarice Starling is assigned to help find a missing woman to save her from a psychopathic serial killer who skins his victims. Clarice attempts to gain a better insight into the twisted mind of the killer by talking to another psychopath Hannibal Lecter, who used to be a respected psychiatrist. FBI agent Jack Crawford believes that Lecter who is also a very powerful and clever mind manipulator have the answers to their questions to help locate the killer. Clarice must first try and gain Lecter's confidence before he is to give away any information.

Enjoy.

Stephen King - The Author

As writers of horror go, Stephen King is probably one of the most famous names. His novels and movies have been read and seen by millions of us. For me personally his early novels are his best. Simple and straight forward terror.

Stephen Edwin King was born in Portland, Maine September 21, 1947, the second son of Donald and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King. After his parents separated when Stephen was a toddler, he and his older brother, David, were raised by his mother. Parts of his childhood were spent in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where his father's family lived, and in Stratford, Connecticut. When Stephen was eleven, his mother moved the children back to, Maine, for good.

Stephen attended school in Durham, Maine, graduating in 1966. At University, he wrote a weekly column for the school newspaper, THE MAINE CAMPUS. He was also active in student politics, serving as a member of the Student Senate. He graduated from the University of Maine in 1970, with a B.A. in English and qualified to teach at the high school level. While most of his friends were drafted to serve in the Vietnam war he never served in the army as he was found unfit for duty due to high blood pressure, limited vision, flat feet, and punctured eardrums.

He and Tabitha Spruce married in January of 1971. He met Tabitha in the library at the University of Maine, where they both worked as students. As Stephen was unable to find a job right away as a teacher, the Kings lived on his earnings as a laborer at an industrial laundry, and Tabitha’s student loan and savings, with an occasional boost from Stephen’s short story sale to men's magazines.

In the fall of 1971, Stephen began teaching high school English classes at Hampden Academy, the public high school in Hampden, Maine. Writing in the evenings and on the weekends, he continued to produce short stories and to work on novels.

His big break came in the spring of 1973, when Doubleday accepted the novel Carrie for publication. On Mother's Day of that year, Stephen learned from his editor at Doubleday, that a major paperback sale would provide him with the means to leave teaching and write full-time.

At the end of the summer of 1973, the Kings moved their growing family (1 girl and 2 boys) to southern Maine. Stephen wrote his next-published novel, originally titled Second Coming and then Jerusalem's Lot, before it became 'Salem's Lot, there.

Carrie was published in the spring of 1974. That same fall, the Kings left Maine for Boulder, Colorado. They lived there for a little less than a year, during which Stephen wrote The Shining, set in Colorado. Returning to Maine in the summer of 1975 the Kings purchased a home in the Lakes Region of western Maine. At that house, Stephen finished writing The Stand, much of which also is set in Boulder along with The Dead Zone.’

Maine is now home. Mr. King is working on a new novel entitled Under the Dome, it’s a reworking of an unfinished novel he tried writing twice before and its set to be published sometime this year.