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Artist and photographer Carrie M. Becker re-imagined Barbie (the doll) as a pathological hoarder, and arranged Barbie’s dream house as such. She explains some of the thought behind the project in her artist’s statement. Somebody call a maid! No, a sanitation crew! You can see many different rooms in her Flickr set. Link -via Laughing Squid
(Image credit: Flickr user Carrie M. Becker)
The following article is from the science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research.
(Image credit: Flickr user Jean-Etienne Minh-Duy Poirrier)
by Alice Shirrell Kaswell, Improbable Research staff
The year 1931 stands out in the history of research about insane people’s favorite colors. That summer, Siegfried E. Katz of the New York State Psychiatric Institute and Hospital published a study called “Color Preference in the Insane.” The full citation is:
“Color Preference in the Insane,” Siegfried E. Katz, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, vol. 26, no. 2, July 1931, pp. 203–11.
Assisted by a Dr. Cheney, Dr. Katz tested 134 hospitalized mental patients. For simplicity’s sake, he limited the testing to six colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet. No black. No white. No shades of gray.
“These colors,” he wrote, “rectangular in shape, one and one-half inches square, cut from Bradley colored papers were pasted in two rows on a gray cardboard. They were three inches apart. The colors were numbered haphazardly and the number of each color placed above it. The cardboard was presented to the patient and he was asked to place his finger on the number of the color he liked best. After he had made the choice he was asked in a similar manner for the next best color, and so on.”
Some of the patients “cooperated well”, and made six choices. Others, Dr. Katz reported, “quickly lost interest and made only one, two or three.”
Blue was the most popular color. Men, in the aggregate, then favored green, but the female patients were divided on green, red or violet as a second choice.
Patients who had resided in the hospital for three or more years were slightly less emphatic about blue. Dr. Katz says that these long-term guests were “those with most marked mental deterioration.” Their preference, as a group, shifted somewhat toward green and yellow. Those of longest tenure, though few in number, had a slightly elevated liking for orange.
The report is packed with tidbits that beg, even now, for further analysis:
==> “38 per cent of dementia praecox and manic-depressives, each, gave first preference to blue, and 42 per cent of all other patients.”
==> “Green received the first choice from 16 per cent of dementia praecox, 9 per cent of manic-depressives, and 13 per cent of other diseases.”
==> “For red as first choice, the percentage of votes were: Manic-depressives, 16; other diseases, 15; dementia praecox, 12. As second choice, they were: Manic-depressives, 22; dementia praecox, 18; other diseases, 13.”
==> “Orange and yellow were also best liked by manic-depressives; green by dementia praecox; and violet by all others.”
Dr. Katz foresaw practical applications for his research. He suggested that “in the furnishings of living quarters the selection of colors pleasing to special groups of patients might be worth consideration.”
Consciously or not, hospital staff seem to have followed Dr. Katz’s insights in fashioning their personal at-work appearance. The evocatively-named Bragard Medical Uniforms, a New York firm founded in 1933, now publishes a list of the most popular uniform colors. The list currently is topped by, in order: royal blue; dark grey (which, alas, Dr Katz excluded from his 1931 survey); dark green; and red.
Dr. Katz’s findings were put to the test, partially, decades later in the study:
“The Relationship Between Color Preference and Psychiatric Disorders,” Cooper B. Holmes, H. Edward Fouty, Philip J. Wurtz and Bruce M. Burdick, Journal of Clinical Psychology, vol. 41, no. 6, November 1985, pp. 746–9.
The authors, at Emporia State University and at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, explain, at the end of their study:
We realize that the reader may question whether the present study merely has added to the confusion about color preferences and personality and color preferences and psychiatric illness. We think not. Enough studies have been reported to present a consistently inconsistent picture of the relationship. That is, it is apparent that a clear-cut relationship between color and psychiatric illness has not been established, and our study continues to show that pattern. This brings into question the use of color in psychiatric diagnosis.
_____________________
This article is republished with permission from the July-August 2008 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!
Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.
It’s a fan-made trailer is composed of edits from Christian Bale movies that altogether makes Bruce Wayne look like even more of a paranoid schizophrenic than he is normally portrayed as. -via I Heart Chaos
WARNING: The following article lists endings to several recent and older films. Therefore you probably should read this list in order to avoid watching these films. You’ll just end up spending $14 on a movie ticket to watch the kid in front of you text on his blackberry for two hours and then get a crappy ending to boot!
There has been a common “twist” ending employed in numerous films over the years that has been rearing its ugly head ever more increasingly. From B horror movies to big budget Oscar contenders, this ending is maddeningly used over and over again. It’s enough to make any cinema lover have a total snap with reality and lose their mind! It’s become the go-to ending for lazy screenplay writers the world over. Now we have all come to expect the M. Night Shyamalan twist ending- Bruce Willis is a ghost, blah, blah, blah. I’m not talking about those clichéd endings. This is a very specific sub genre of movies that feature a twist ending. I am of course referring to films in which one or more of the main characters is imaginary and all in the head of the other character- ala Tyler Durden in Fight Club.
Ever since Fight Club made a big cinematic splash in 1999, movie makers have gone psycho with this previously interesting twist. There are a lot of films out there that you may think are All in Your Head Movies (AIYH movies as the kids say). However, for our purposes, we shall define these films as those in which the main character is mentally insane and imagining someone else doing things that he or she is in fact themselves responsible for. They can’t be dead (living in the afterlife or as a ghost) and it can’t have all been a dream. So with that in mind sit back, relax, grab yourself some popcorn and enjoy this list of All in Your Head Movies… unless.. wait a minute? ..No! It can’t be! Maybe you already read it.. because you wrote it.. you are ME. Woaaaah.
Fight Club
This is the classic upon which all other recent AIYH movies must live up to. This film came out before this twist ending was all the rage and thus gets a pass on using the cliché. Most movie goers didn’t see this ending coming and when it was revealed that Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) is all in the head of Edward Norton’s character it was truly amazing. The best part was the dizzying flashback showing us how Norton’s character was really Durden; even fighting himself in the parking lot! Project Mayhem! Unfortunately after Fight Club it’s all downhill.
Secret Window
“You stole my story..” and two hours of my life. This is the line that the imaginary AIYH character John Shooter mumbles over and over again to Johnny Depp’s character, a writer who has locked himself away in a wooded cabin to finish his novel. Only Depp can’t get any writing done because the crazed yokel farmer keeps showing up claiming to have been plagiarized by the author. In retaliation the farmer supposedly kills Depp’s dog and burns down his soon to be ex wife’s house amongst other atrocities. The film isn’t half bad and some audiences might even be gripped with the suspense of this Stephen King inspired thriller only to suffer the let down of a textbook AIYH movie ending. We are treated to the full shabang complete with a spinning room and flash backs showing us what really happened sans the weird farmer guy.
more …
Mass hysteria is when delusions or other symptoms of mental illness seem to spread through a whole population of people. Listverse has ten strange cases of the phenomena from the not-so-distant past. One affected those who followed the Portuguese soap opera Morangos com Açúcar.
In May, 2006, an outbreak of the “Morangos com Açúcar Virus” was reported in Portuguese schools. 300 or more students at 14 schools reported similar symptoms to those experienced by the characters in a recent episode. These included rashes, difficulty breathing, and dizziness, forcing some schools to close. The Portuguese National Institute for Medical Emergency dismissed the illness as mass hysteria. This story concerned some parents because of the major influence this series has on the kids and teens that watch, it was in newspaper and magazines articles and elsewhere.
Link -via the Presurfer
Among the scientists, inventors, engineers, and leaders who left their mark on the world are some who were mentally ill or even downright insane. The ten men in the list showed signs of paranoia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, crippling introversion, and other disorders. For example, you know Samuel Morse as the inventor of the telegraph and Morse Code, but there was more to him.
He was a little paranoid. He was determined that the Blacks, Jews, Catholics and the entire nation of Austria were working to destroy the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants of America. He wrote several books on the subject in which he talked about how the immigrants and lesser races were oppressing all the white people, how the Jews and Catholics were working together to kill Protestants, and how all of these groups met on a regular basis in the basement of an orphanage in Ireland. Oh, and Austria’s in there too somewhere.
Link -via Unique Daily
O.M.G. A Texas death row inmate with a history of mental problem pulled his eyeball and then ate it!
Before his trial (of which he was convicted and sentenced to death), he had pulled out an eyeball (but didn’t eat it). The judge had declared him mentally fit for trial:
A death-row officer at the Polunsky Unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice found Thomas in his cell with blood on his face and took him to the infirmary.
"Thomas said he pulled out his eye and subsequently ingested it," agency spokesman Jason Clark said Friday.
Thomas was treated at East Texas Medical Center in Tyler after the Dec. 9 incident. Then he was transferred and remains at the Jester Unit, a prison psychiatric facility near Richmond southwest of Houston.
"He will finally be able to receive the mental health care that we had wanted and begged for from day 1," Bobbie Peterson-Cate, Thomas’ trial attorney, told the Sherman Herald Democrat. "He is insane and mentally ill. It is exactly the same reason he pulled out the last one."
In Hayden Idaho, a man in his mid 20′s whose name was withheld, who believed he bore the “mark of the beast” amputated one of his hands with a circular saw, then cooked it in the microwave then called 911.
According to sheriff’s Capt. Ben Wolfinger the man, was calm when he arrived at his northern Idaho town. “It had been somewhat cooked by the time the deputy arrived,” Wolfinger said. “He put a tourniquet on his arm before, so he didn’t bleed to death. That kind of mental illness is just sad.”
Via: msnbc
