This experiment challenged the idea of validity surrounding mental health diagnoses and highlighted the subjectivity involved in diagnosing mental health conditions. There are many criticisms of the experiment - such as the obvious use of deception. However, the experiment leant support to the push for community care and the effort to deinstitutionalise people with mental health conditions.

The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars, by Greg Mort (1999)

HOKUM 2026・dir. Damian McCarthy

I am a Hero

Ai amu a hîrô / I Am a Hero | 2015

アイアムアヒーロー (2016)

These are the Ruins of Quilmes in the Tucumán province of northwestern Argentina. The Quilmes Indians were fierce, resisting the Inca invasions of the 15th century and continuing to resist the Spaniards for another 130 years until their defeat in 1667. Stopped off here on my way north to Cafayate for some wine-chugging.

In 1930, over 2,000 occupants of an Inuit village located on Lake Anjikuni in northern Canada disappeared, and none of them were ever found. A fur trapper named Joe Labelle went to visit the village. He had been there before, and knew it to be a thriving village of fishermen. When he got there, however, the place was deserted. There was one fire, with a ruined stew left over it. No footprints were found, their dogs were buried under a snow drift and had perished, and their provisions were still in their huts. And, finally, the ancestral graves of the people had been emptied. No trace of them was ever found, and their disappearance remains a great mystery.

A sadness dawned on me as I concluded that this was the way of the world. All things have their time and place in our lives, they occupy exactly that period and purpose for which they are created. After that, perhaps they continue live in the shadow of their once-indispensable existence, carrying only its memory, appropriated to whatever use seems fit.

Aanchal Malhotra ♡

“Do you fall in love often?” “Yes often. With a view, with a book, with a dog, a cat, with numbers, with friends, with complete strangers, with nothing at all.” - Jeanette Winterson

“We took my grandmother back to Taljanga in 2014, to the land she was born on, to the house she grew up in. So much of it had remained the same, as if time had stood still since their migration, and yet so much had also changed. Foliage had entwined around the grand columns, the green of trees sprouted out of staircases. This building, the ‘Thakur Dalan’ stands next to the main house, and is where the annual Durga Puja occurred - a tradition that is still followed by the minority Hindu families who live in the area. When my family lived here, this was a Kali temple and the priest had managed to save one arm of the idol. Subsequent generations of the priest’s family had worshipped that remnant of the original idol, and prayed in the name of "Roy”, my great grandfather, even though they had never met him or anyone from his family. One of the most moving things was to learn that they had worshipped on our behalf for over seventy years.“ . . This excerpt is from a series of conversations in an ongoing research project.

(via onceuponawildflower)

A tall pile of wax on the Villa Ganz veranda; photograph taken by Alan Levine