Hollyoaks: a dialectical analysis

My guilty pleasure is watching Hollyoaks. Ok, maybe something not to shout about. I could deconstruct the postmodernism of Hollyoaks along with the pop culture, melodrama, materialism and consumerism (and bad acting….) but I wouldn’t want to inflict that agony on the cyber readership. Sometimes I do wonder whether this fictitious town, Hollyoaks has a border patrol keeping out the average looking people.

Though in saying all this, Hollyoaks has its own contradictions, which (well, it has creator of Brookside, Phil Redmond at the helm) does sometimes include hard hitting story lines in a sensitive and understanding way but that can jar against the usual backdrop of superficiality and froth. And the sometimes social realism is reminiscent of early Brookside where Redmond did tackle important issues.

Again, the social realism is at times combined with utterly over-the-top storylines and narratives such as psycho killer stalking the streets of Hollyoaks, and the cull of characters gives Midsomer Murders, Morse, Lewis and Wire in the Blood a run for their money.

And it is something Redmond is renowned for….over-the-top storylines… plane hitting Emmerdale…? Redmond’s handiwork …. How to clear out the cast, create an audacious totally surreal storyline pack it will explosions, explosions and more explosions…and that leaves half of the cast alive.

When the grim reaper wanders onto the streets of Hollyoaks you know there will be murderous mayhem at the end.

But ignoring the exaggerated storylines, there’s one at the moment troubling me and that’s young goth Newt.  His backstory involves living in care and mental distress, he meets ‘Hollyoaks’ family who foster him, where he builds a positive relationship. His mental distress increases, but it is regulated by his medication. When he doesn’t take his medication for his schizophrenia an auditory voice kicks-in. The viewer sees the ‘voice’ in a physical human form and it originated from his childhood where he witnessed a traumatic incident (he finds his friend who has committed suicide). That ‘friend’ and ‘voice’ lives on in Newt’s head.

Why does this storyline worry me? Well, it is due to the emphasis on medication, and the model medical of psychiatry. Newt is better (for want of a better word) when he takes his meds but the ‘voice’ returns once he stops the meds. What message does that convey? Voice hearing is stabilised once meds are taken?  This explanation fails to challenge the orthodoxy in psychiatry, the ‘drugs do work’ ethos and highlight alternatives. Along, with the general stereotype that ‘voices’ tell the hearer to do bad things to themself or to others. And that is what a shrink is usually concerned with, not with the hearer having to endure voice(s) day in and day out, from the mundane to the painful to the positive/negative…..Voice hearers are defined as potential ’psycho killers’ … But that is the stereotype and far from the truth. And there are alternatives….

The person can come to terms with the voices with support and be able to contextualise them. Others ways of dealing with voices include support groups, coping strategies such as keeping a diary and listening to voices (who do they sound like? when do they appear?). The activist based org. Hearing Voices Network has done so much to challenge the stigma of voice hearing.

I think what I am trying to convey is that storylines and narratives should include alternative discourses, stretch our imagination and to create honest debate. Again, whether Hollyoaks is that vehicle is up for debate but it wants to put forward storylines that include mental distress then it needs to go beyond the usual interpretation of voice hearing, for example.

I won’t go into details but there are definite alternatives argued for by the mental health user movement over the last 20 odd years.

I am not totally dismissive of the character of Newt, it was interesting that the ‘voice’ was someone in his life and which is connected to trauma. And the reality is that is there is connection between traumatic experiences and voice hearing. It does concern me what they will do next, I read that suicide is now part of his storyline, again there is a connection but, fundamentally, it is combined with him not taking his meds.

It should be about treating the individual as a whole person as opposed to a cluster of symptoms/bio-chemicals with the end result being determined by which drug to dope you up with. Zombification of the mind and spirit, functioning level a big fat zero.

To be honest, as someone throughout their childhood and teenage years was a ‘voice hearer’ I do in some surreal way relate to Newt,  especially the pain, vulnerability, confusion and feeling marginalised (nobody understands) it is still hard writing about voice hearing as still at the back of my mind I wonder what assumptions people will conclude about me. The stigma, stereotypes and fear is there.

And the way Hollyoaks has presented this storyline doesn’t undermine the stereotypes and stigma it kinda reinforces them, maybe there will be a twist. But that’s my own personal opinion.

The video is of Florence and the Machine, You’ve Got the Love, I picked that as it was playing at the end of one of Hollyoaks Later (after the watershed viewing).

The pursuit of happiness in an unequal society

The demand from each of us should be quite simple: “Implement the NICE guidelines”. In other words, give people with mental illness the choice of. psychological therapy. (The Depression Report 2006)

When I think of Richard Layard’s books on Happiness Ken Dodd’s song of the same name always pops into my head. Who knows why. Once upon a time in the not too distant past Layard’s was NL’s ‘Happiness Tsar’, he proposed we could easily train 10,000 new therapists within the next seven years. Some 5,000 of these should be “clinical psychologists”..

I recall at the time thinking this proposal was rather over ambitious and where would, precisely, the money come from to fund this adventure. And now this report:

 A flagship government strategy to train an army of therapists to get the nation off antidepressants and into work could be dramatically scaled back amid claims it is experiencing problems.

What about ‘tailored therapy’ geared towards the individual? Oh, that’s not cost effective. Yes, there is a massive problem about the over-usage and over-prescribing of pharmaceuticals where people do end up languishing in a zombified state. By the way before anyone says..no I am not completely knocking drugs and CBT… if it works for people then great but surely it should be based on choice and giving people that choice about what they want, on their own terms as opposed to threats of sanctions etc.

And on this is issue of ‘happiness’….yes, it is an individual thing, although who can be happy when those close to you are unhappy. In terms of policy though it must beg the question of the kind of society that we live in. Remember that the early theorising of neo-liberalism were about creating a new kind of self reliant human indifferent to the needs and wants of others except as expressed through money. We need a society that gives people the space to be happy. You cannot be happy in a social environment where you face continual dispossession and exploitation. The citizen of an industrial society today can be no more happy than the subsistence farmer confronting plagues of locusts and the depredations of the local landowner.

More misery to be experienced when this bunch of schmucks get elected with their big ideas, ‘tough and difficult’ choices to be made which is code for shafting for poor.

 If you want to read something that gives a political and scientific analysis of unequal societies then read Wilkinson and Pickett’s The Spirit Level.