Heroes Not Zombies

I was recently asked to give a talk at a Palliative Care Conference in Dundee. One of the organisers had seen me use movies as a educational tool when teaching doctors and wanted me to demonstrate that. It was well received and I thought I’d put up a series of posts based on the talk. I hope you like them.

TWO QUESTIONS FOR ALL DOCTORS

I think the core of a doctor’s job is to try and understand people. One thing I find helpful in that regard is to have two questions at the back of my head during every consultation –

1. What kind of world does this person live in?
2. How does this person cope?

With the first question, I’m trying to understand what’s important to the person and how they create a sense of self. I won’t go into this in much more detail just now but one well-known way of viewing the world is through the triad of body, mind and spirit. I find that quite helpful. We can consider each of these as a focus and for every one of us we can place ourselves on the this map – the body, mind, spirit map.

For the purposes of understanding where someone lives on this map, I think that the body represents the physical. These are people to whom physical security and physical reality are paramount. They prioritise material issues and they tend to prefer to have a rational, logical approach to problems – you’ve probably heard someone say “Don’t give me your touchy-feely nonsense!” when asked to discuss how they are feeling. Utility and practicality are their key values. For others, emotional security is more important. They are very aware of feelings and of relationships. They see themselves in relation to others. The third focus is spiritual and by this I mean the need to make sense of the world and the idea that there is something greater than each of us as individuals. This might be religious but it might not. What is important to that person is that they need to have a sense of purpose.

This map, by the way, is not a set of boxes into which people should be placed. The map is more like a map of three areas or neighbouring countries with flexible, moving, overlapping borders. Some people spend all their lives in only one of the countries but most move around!

This, for me, is a fundamental way of creating a sense of self – a way of answering the “who am I?” question. But related to this there is another way, which is how we see ourselves in relation to others. For all of us we live with a tension of two opposites – the need to be separate, unique, individual AND the need to belong, to love and be loved, to identify with others. I say this is related because I find that often the physically-focussed person is more towards the pole of individuality and separateness and the emotionally-focussed towards the pole of identification with others.

So take a look at this movie clip and listen the main character’s monologue. Here is a man who has a sense of being self-contained and who is materially-focussed.

“I am Ibiza!”

To see the opposite pole, have a look at this clip. Here are people whose sense of identity comes from the community –

“It is no bad thing to celebrate a simple life”

These are two good examples of very different ways of experiencing the world, different sets of priorities and different ways of creating a sense of self.

OK, so some of you will be saying hobbits?? They’re not real! But, trust me, the Hugh Grant character in About a Boy isn’t real either! But let me address that in Part 2 where I’ll show a couple of clips from one of my favourite movies, Brassed Off, which is set in a Northern English mining community. You can compare that to the lifestyle of the hobbits in the Shire.