The pot calling the kettle crazy

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on November 26th, 2007

An article from the Victoria (BC) Times Colonist details the efforts of mental health consellor David Granirer’s efforts to start a new branch of his national Stand Up for Mental Health program in Victoria.

Granirer has also produced a documentary, “Cracking Up,” that chronicles the story of his classes, in which schizophrenic, depressed or bipolar folks learn to become stand-up comedians. He tirelessly defends the mentally ill:

The way the mentally ill are portrayed in the media tends to promote negative stereotypes, added Granirer. He notes that Vancouver newspapers made much of a bipolar man shot and killed by police in August after he attacked them with a chain. Yet when “Cracking Up”– a good news story about the mentally ill– was aired the same month, the media virtually ignored it.

He jokes that if plumbers made national headlines every time they shot someone, then “you would be really afraid of plumbers.”

Yes. Now let’s look at what Granirer said two paragraphs earlier:

…many professional comics perceived as normal people suffer from mental illnesses. Not many regular folk are drawn to a profession that requires hanging out nightly at clubs in an environment that encourages smoking, drinking and drugging.

Here’s a man who is upset with the way that the mentally ill are portrayed in the media and how it tends to promote negative stereotypes. Yet, when he steps up to that same media megaphone, he proclaims rather clearly that many standup comics are mentally ill. And that their work environment is all about smoking, drinking and “drugging!” (Whatever that is!?!)

And, to top it all off, he advocates taking a group of bipolar, schizophrenic and depressed people and teaching them standup, so that they might one day practice their art in dens of smoking, drinking and drugging. All the while, hangin out with other individuals, many of which are, according to him, mentally ill.

Sounds like a splendid plan. We’re sorry we didn’t think of it ourselves.

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