• he/him

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hthrflwrs
@hthrflwrs

Every profession has that one piece of semi-mainstream media that gets everything correct about them even though it's absolutely not the norm. Doctors have Scrubs, lawyers have My Cousin Vinny, hackers have Hackers. What's yours?


AtFruitBat
@AtFruitBat

because a lot of the time the way that becomes dramatic enough to depict in films/TV is if the therapist has shit professional boundaries. ๐Ÿ˜‚

Otherwise therapy in TV/films is often used as a device for the main character to monologue on camera without breaking the 4th wall, and/or to receive some pithy summation of their situation. In which case while the character is nominally in therapy, you seldom get a sense of the process of therapy, or the therapist themself, and so there's not a lot to relate to in terms of professional experiences.

Having said that, for books, Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy is wonderful. Not just for showing a historically grounded take on conceptualising combat-related trauma, but for the impact of that work on Barker's W.H.R. Rivers (based on the real Rivers), a genuinely compassionate clinician who finds himself confronted by the knowledge that successfully treating his patients means sending them back to the front, where they will very likely be killed.

Barker is generally good on therapy. Even when she writes therapy with boundary issues in something like Border Crossing, she gets that the therapist character is vulnerable to blurring those professional lines because of the things going on in his personal life that leave him emotionally ungrounded.

For TV, and bearing in mind that drama is the order of the day, In Treatment (which I stuck with for a season or two) has a similar sense of showing the therapist's vulnerability, as well as the process of therapy. The therapist feels like a real person in a professional role. And at least he has actual clinical supervision! And I don't mean the monumentally fucked up cinematic version of supervision, replete with multiple boundary violations, like you'd see in something like Hannibal. ๐Ÿคฃ

For film, The Sixth Sense. Yeah, sure, it's a supernatural thriller about a kid who sees dead people walking around, and they don't know that they're dead. And there's a big plot twist. But the developing relationship between the therapist and his child client, and the way he tries to work with the kid's mother - all of that has a ring of truth, even when you move through the twist. Because yeah, that twist is fantastical, but it's also about the therapeutic relationship, as much as it's about the twist.


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in reply to @hthrflwrs's post:

The Critic. Pop media representations of critics, being produced by people who often find themselves the subject of a critic's criticism, tend to be uncharitable, so it's nice to see a TV show that tries to empathize with the concerns critics tend to face ("That's what 'good''s for.").

IDK if this is mainstream enough but I think Connie Willis's time-travelling Oxford historian series captures the stressful but aimless activity of being a PhD student very well. Especially To Say Nothing of the Dog.

Misread "profession" as "person" and started trying to think about the answer for someone like me (mental health disability),

Closest I can think of is not exactly mainstream, and doesn't quite get everything right, (notably, I strongly disagree with the thesis "these people aren't actually disabled, just cut them off and they'll shape up when they face the prospect of having to go without food") But man, Welcome To The NHK really understands a few things about what it's like to have severe social anxiety.

My dad is an experienced sailor and has variously crewed and skippered on a few boat deliveries as a side hustle, and he insists CAPTAIN RON (1992) is dead-on accurate to his experience of owner-on-board deliveries, at least in terms of vibes and power dynamics (obviously not so much in specific sailing detail)

you already mentioned Hackers (1995) which you know i'm all about, but for a more contemporary pick i think Mr. Robot stayed pretty down to earth in the first couple of seasons before it really turned to speculative fiction.