more Signs

About 3 weeks ago I posted an article about a disturbing sign posted outside the Dekalb stop in Brooklyn. When I got home that day, the sign was gone. Well today, a NEW sign was up:it reads (as far as I could tell from the picture):

Freedom OF Speech Freedom of Press Freedom To protest
Please do not remove this poster
A Doctor name Dennis Blanchette is also threating to kill my 13 year old daughter Allexis with the Device he has illeagilly place in her Tonsil when she was down My name is Marlene Chambers I'm being abuse and murdered by a Dr Wendy Oliviar from brooklyn Hospital who was paid to do a hit job by Dennis' son mother who Drive a black Rodes Jeep and rumer has it she work for New York Police Dept so no one takes my complain seriosuly all they do is lock me up and let me loose all I own including custody of my daughter an no [ resolve?] has been reached Instead they pretend the Device does not exist inside my Head/Tonsil/throat

Dr Wendy Chamber put the Device inside my throat during a breast implant removal surgery December 2001 at New York Methodist Hosp She's using it to pretend I have an Ilness then prescribe a Drugs then Kill me as if I dies From the make believe illness. Diseases are genetics, microorganism or environmental there should be no technology in hte mouth acting on the Brain's Hypothalamous to deregulate the body's stability and make a healthy person appear [???] this is sabatoge, fraud and genocide. the medical Society is a terrorist they laugh and spit at me through the Device inside my throat right by my left hear drum.

As much as it may seem a stretch to connect this apparently recurring incident to NEXT TO NORMAL, I actually think it's quite relevant. I've been thinking about this post by Chris Caggiano which asserts the belief that N2N displays an "anti-psychiatry bias". I don't know exactly how I feel about that assertion. If the show is anti-anything it's anti-pharmaceutical solution, which is a viewpoint I tend to agree with (or, to meet Caggiano halfway, a bias I tend to share). But yet, when confronted with such extreme metal illness as exhibited in the poster above, my first instinct is to (glibly) think the author is "off her meds" or that someone needs to "up the dosage". But is the patient happier in this crazed sign-making stage than in a medicate situation? That must be the case, otherwise, why would anyone go off their meds? But what must her daughter think when the difference between medicated and unmediated behavior (again, this is making a HUGE assumption that Marelene Chambers has ever been offered medication or any sort of therapy) could be the difference between having a mother and being in foster care?

And the more I go through this loop in my mind, the more I realize this is the precise loop that N2N dramatizes so successfully. It lets us simultaneously empathize with Diana's reluctance to feel imprisoned by pills and treatments that, from her point of view, stifle her emotions, creativity and identity while also sharing her family's exasperation at having to deal with the alternative (aka, reality).