WRITTEN ON September 22nd, 2005 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Uncategorized
Here’s a powerful example of a “diary” recording an experience of public services. The tone is neutral, but the story is awful, as an innocent Frenchman tries to visit his girlfriend and is arrested on the tube. Warning: contains shocking descriptions of profiling and data retention.
It works in banal situations as well as extreme ones, good as well as bad. The important things is to note what happens, with timings and whatever detail is possible, in a neutral manner. This dreadful story is made very powerful because of the dispassionate “diary” format of David’s description.
This is one format we should use to describe in depth public-service encounters. They dojn’t have to be aawful, they could be as brilliant as the nursing care my Dad has been receiving during double pneumonia (my mind was elsewhere, unlike David’s here).
It’s the “humanity versus machine” element that makes a personal account necessary. The people are human. The system that produces them (whether arresting officers or nurses) and the rules they work to are not.
Louise F writes: David’s experience seems to have significant parallels with a social psychology experiment conducted back in the 70s in the US. Researchers got themselves admitted to psychiatric hospitals by acting up, and then changed behaviour back to normal on admission. However, all this normal behaviour (things like writing letters) was interpreted by hospital staff as symtomatic of their so-called illness. Once a conclusion has been drawn, *any* behaviour or data seems to be interpreted as supportive of the conclusion/diagnosis already reached.
This seems to be the normal – human – state of affairs, how human minds work. The point being that there should be an awareness of this as a phenomenon, and measures and procedures in place that help prevent it from happening in circumstances such as these.