Support Groups in Popular Media
- The 1996 novel Fight Club (and the 1999 film adaptation) presents a wry analysis of support groups and their function.
- In the Pixar film Finding Nemo, the two main characters encounter three sharks that form a self-help support group to help each other swear off eating fish and change their image.
- The hit musical RENT, there is a support group to help sufferers of AIDS cope with their illness.
- In Evermore, the teenage heroine's best friend is 'what you'd call an anonymous-group addict...she's attended twelve-step meetings for alcoholics, narcotics, codependents, debtors, gamblers, cyber addicts, nicotine junkies, social phobics, pack rats, and vulgarity lovers'. Contemplating her lack of parental support, however, the heroine concludes that 'if standing before a room full of people, creating some sob story about her tormented struggle with that day's fill-in-the-blank addiction makes her feel important, well, who am I to judge'.
- In Wreck-It Ralph, the titular villain finds a support group for the "bad guys" that are involved in other video games. While he had been invited for 30 years, he had refused until his 30th anniversary of being in the arcade. Ultimately he finds that he is not as crazy as he thought, which goes back to the point of the support group.
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Famous quotes containing the words support, groups, popular and/or media:
“... the first reason for psychology’s failure to understand what people are and how they act, is that clinicians and psychiatrists, who are generally the theoreticians on these matters, have essentially made up myths without any evidence to support them; the second reason for psychology’s failure is that personality theory has looked for inner traits when it should have been looking for social context.”
—Naomi Weisstein (b. 1939)
“Belonging to a group can provide the child with a variety of resources that an individual friendship often cannot—a sense of collective participation, experience with organizational roles, and group support in the enterprise of growing up. Groups also pose for the child some of the most acute problems of social life—of inclusion and exclusion, conformity and independence.”
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“If our entertainment culture seems debased and unsatisfying, the hope is that our children will create something of greater worth. But it is as if we expect them to create out of nothing, like God, for the encouragement of creativity is in the popular mind, opposed to instruction. There is little sense that creativity must grow out of tradition, even when it is critical of that tradition, and children are scarcely being given the materials on which their creativity could work”
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“Today the discredit of words is very great. Most of the time the media transmit lies. In the face of an intolerable world, words appear to change very little. State power has become congenitally deaf, which is why—but the editorialists forget it—terrorists are reduced to bombs and hijacking.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)