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:
“Certainly parents play a crucial role in the lives of individuals who are intellectually gifted or creatively talented. But this role is not one of active instruction, of teaching children skills,... rather, it is support and encouragement parents give children and the intellectual climate that they create in the home which seem to be the critical factors.”
—David Elkind (20th century)
“... until both employers’ and workers’ groups assume responsibility for chastising their own recalcitrant children, they can vainly bay the moon about “ignorant” and “unfair” public criticism. Moreover, their failure to impose voluntarily upon their own groups codes of decency and honor will result in more and more necessity for government control.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“Both gossip and joking are intrinsically valuable activities. Both are essentially social activities that strengthen interpersonal bonds—we do not tell jokes and gossip to ourselves. As popular activities that evade social restrictions, they often refer to topics that are inaccessible to serious public discussion. Gossip and joking often appear together: when we gossip we usually tell jokes and when we are joking we often gossip as well.”
—Aaron Ben-Ze’Ev, Israeli philosopher. “The Vindication of Gossip,” Good Gossip, University Press of Kansas (1994)
“The question confronting the Church today is not any longer whether the man in the street can grasp a religious message, but how to employ the communications media so as to let him have the full impact of the Gospel message.”
—Pope John Paul II (b. 1920)