Mental Health

During my stay in Husky’s hometown, I’ve plenty of time. Other than reading books, I also watch dramas and movies.

 The drama that I watched is The World Between Us (我们与恶的距离), a Taiwanese drama recommended by a colleague. It came to our conversation when we were discussing about the  Joker movie. 

Thank God The World Between Us is only 10 episodes. I don’t know how others manage to “chase drama” which has at least 25 episodes, watching 2 episodes straight already made me feel tired haha! #gettingold

Summary of the drama: What is it to be like to be a family member of a mass shooting murderer? When victim’s family members have the rights to be angry, upset, and remorseful about what had happened to their love ones, what bout the family members of the murderer? How frustrated they are when the blame is on them just because the family somehow “produced” a murderer? They don’t have the rights to complain that they are rejected and discriminated by the society, and they don’t have the rights to continue their life and be happy, just because their family member had cause a heartache to the society.

I remember very clearly when the mother of the murderer said this sentence: “ You all think that I’ve wasted 20 years of my life just to raise a murderer?!”

A lot of mass shooting murderers have the same trait worldwide: that prior to the shootings, they behave like normal, not a bit of bitterness even. And they are good kids and nobody would have thought that they would do something like this.

And thus, even though the murderer is sentenced to death, the lawyer keeps on insisting on knowing what’s the reason behind the mass shooting. If only we can find out the core reason, instead of pressuring the government to sentence the murderers to death, we might be able to stop even more mass shootings from happening. Which I do agreed, because a person won’t just wake up one day and decide that oh I’m going to murder people today. No they don’t, but it must be something that happened to them in the past which accumulates and triggers them to “do something big”. It can be feeling inferior, or being told negative words over and over again. That can spark someone to want to prove to others that no, I’m not who you say I am. And I’m going to do something to proof you wrong, in a wrong way.

And the media industry has also been diverted to wrong direction these years, especially with social media. What you see, might not be the whole truth. And people just like to comment based on what they see. If only we can stop judging, stop misinterpret what we know, we wouldn’t have caused so many suicidal cases.

But I must also admit one thing which is humans’ hearts nowadays seem to be more fragile then ever. Back then our grandparents and parents era, they seem to be able to do whatever they want, and ask ways have the bravery to face the world and accept new challenges. But now it seems that we’re unable to face any negativity that’s thrown to us. We’ve lose the courage to live, so we choose to avoid life and face death. 

And then I watched Joker.

This is a movie that I’ve avoided watching because it was depressing. Or so I heard. And perhaps I’ve been watching The World Around Us, so it wasn’t that depressed when I watch Joker. And also maybe I was sleepy when I watched it, I thought it was kinda draggy and was hoping that Joker can stop laughing. It was of the same theme as The World Around Us, being bullied and discriminated. One fine line distinguishes a person from being bullied to bullying people back or to ignore the naysayers and be a stronger person. Just one fine line, will lead to so many incidents afterward. 

But surprisingly Joker doesn’t touch my heart the way The World Around Us touched mine. Maybe the latter involves more on families and I got to learn different perspective, be it family members of mass shooting murderer, family members of victims of mass shooting, family members of mental health issues patients, and also how the society perceive these people. So it covers more on a wide range of perceptions. 


But life’s exciting, isn’t it? If only we put down our fragile hearts and judgmental eyes , and use our lives to help those who need us.