Also in English!
De afgelopen jaren is er in boeken, series en films veel aandacht besteed aan de mentale toestand van personages, zowel bij personages met openlijk benoemde diagnoses als bij personages die veel symptomen vertonen maar waar deze niet direct bij naam genoemd worden. Het is leuk om hierin te kunnen herkennen en gezien te worden, maar klopt het beeld dat vaak wordt weergegeven? Hoe stigmatiserend zijn deze personages eigenlijk of zijn het goede voorbeelden die je aan vrienden en familie kunt laten zien, zodat zij zich kunnen voorstellen hoe het voelt?
Bij Maverick Minds gaan we hier dieper op in en onderzoeken we hoe depressie in film of literatuur wordt geportretteerd. Of psychose. Of manie. Stemmingswisselingen zijn heel persoonlijk en iedereen ervaart ze anders. We gaan kijken of het beeld dat in de populaire media wordt neergezet overeenkomt met hoe wij het zelf ervaren, wat er anders is en vooral wat er anders kan in de weergave. Door onze eigen ervaringen als lens te gebruiken bij het kijken naar deze karakters, komen we erachter waarin we onszelf wel of niet kunnen herkennen. Op deze manier kun je je minder alleen voelen in je eigen ervaringen en je meer gehoord en gezien voelen. Welk boek of welke film zou jij aanraden om te laten zien hoe jij de wereld ervaart? Wat maakt het tot een goed voorbeeld of juist tot een zeer stigmatiserend beeld dat niet strookt met de werkelijkheid?
Elke maand ontmoeten we elkaar op Griend3 en praten we over symptomen en eigenschappen zoals geïnterpreteerd door populaire media, en hoe deze wel of niet overeenkomen met onze eigen ervaringen. De ene maand lezen we een boek, de andere maand kijken we samen een film of aflevering van een serie. Voel je vrij om je eigen inbreng te geven over boeken/films/series die je wilt bespreken! Dit zal ons helpen beter te begrijpen waar onze ervaringen hetzelfde zijn en waar ze verschillen. Hoe populaire media wel of niet kunnen helpen onze ervaringen te delen, zodat we er gemakkelijker over kunnen praten en begrepen kunnen worden. Dit alles uiteraard in een veilige ruimte: wat er in Maverick Minds wordt gezegd, blijft in Maverick Minds.
Coming up:
2 July 2024
SERIES: Spinning Out – 1 season 10 episodes ENGLISH
Date: Tuesday 2 July 2024 – 18:00 – Griend 3, 6221AJ
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A figure skating Olympic hopeful’s struggle to balance love, family and fragile mental health as her dream of winning takes a dizzying hold.
Creator: Samantha Stratton
Starring: Kaya Scodelario, January Jones, Willow Shields
Recently covered:
4 June 2024
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath ENGLISH
Date: Tuesday 4 June 2024 – 18:00 – Griend 3, 6221AJ
The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under—maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther’s breakdown with such intensity that Esther’s insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is an extraordinary accomplishment and has made The Bell Jar a haunting American classic.
7 May 2024
Sorrow And Bliss – Meg Mason ENGLISH
Date: Tuesday 7 May 2024 – 18:00 – Griend 3, 6221AJ
This novel is about a woman called Martha. She knows there is something wrong with her but she doesn’t know what it is. Her husband Patrick thinks she is fine. He says everyone has something, the thing is just to keep going.
Martha told Patrick before they got married that she didn’t want to have children. He said he didn’t mind either way because he has loved her since he was fourteen and making her happy is all that matters, although he does not seem able to do it.
By the time Martha finds out what is wrong, it doesn’t really matter anymore. It is too late to get the only thing she has ever wanted. Or maybe it will turn out that you can stop loving someone and start again from nothing – if you can find something else to want.
Alone With You In The Ether – Olivie Blake ENGLISH
Date: Tuesday 2 April 2024 – 18:00 – Griend 3, 6221AJ
Two people meet in the Art Institute by chance. Prior to their encounter, he is a doctoral student who manages his destructive thoughts with compulsive calculations about time travel; she is a bipolar counterfeit artist, undergoing court-ordered psychotherapy. By the end of the story, these things will still be true. But this is not a story about endings.
For Regan, people are predictable and tedious, including and perhaps especially herself. She copes with the dreariness of existence by living impulsively, imagining a new, alternate timeline being created in the wake of every rash decision.
To Aldo, the world feels disturbingly chaotic. He gets through his days by erecting a wall of routine: a backbeat of rules and formulas that keep him going. Without them, the entire framework of his existence would collapse.
For Regan and Aldo, life has been a matter of resigning themselves to the blueprints of inevitability—until the two meet. Could six conversations with a stranger be the variable that shakes up the entire simulation?
My Year of Rest and Relaxation – Ottessa Moshfegh ENGLISH
Date: Tuesday 5 March 2024 – 18:00 – Griend 3, 6221AJ
From one of our boldest, most celebrated new literary voices, a novel about a young woman’s efforts to duck the ills of the world by embarking on an extended hibernation with the help of one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature and the battery of medicines she prescribes.
Our narrator should be happy, shouldn’t she? She’s young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?
My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it is a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers.
