‘Confused man in stolen clothes smashes window out of bakery’. ‘Robbery confused man with butcher knife’. ‘Confused man leaves suspicious bag in McDonald’s toilet’ Just a selection of the regional headlines of the past month. And then we’re not even talking about the hostage situation in Ede on Saturday. It was so serious that the confused man was promoted to “man with psychological problems.”
In recent years, the confused man has been in the news more and more often: people in mental distress who cause nuisance by, for example, using random violence. In the eight-part documentary series Confused (NPO 3), Jessica Villerius investigates the stories behind those headlines. As a starting point she takes the murder of former politician Els Borst by a confused man. A report that was published on this subject showed, among other things, that the care for people with acute psychological problems was substandard. The author of that report says that ten years later nothing has improved.
Confused opens with a series of deadly incidents. But the program really comes to life when Villerius treats confused men who mainly suffer from this themselves. She visits a few with Jan, a police officer who is concerned about the fate of the confused man. Anthony was a young folk singer who went off the rails and now lives in a dumpster. Villerius and Jan visit his new care home under construction together. Anthony fills up: it’s been a long time since he had a home. We also see him in a video clip from the time when he still had all his teeth. Shiny white teeth with vampire-like fangs. Maybe it was dentures.
Villerius mainly produces a series of beautiful reports, full of special stories and people. We don’t hear much about the causes of the confused man epidemic, but perhaps we will. Pointer has already made a series about that. The cause is mainly the cutbacks in psychological care. The confused man should not be allowed to run loose.
Shame and sadness
The second part of Out of the cramp (NPO 3), a triptych about racism, opens with Sosha Duysker reading an old blog of herself to her therapist Glenn Helberg. The blog dates from the time when she wanted to present herself as white as possible and is intended to reassure a white audience. She wore her curls in a ponytail so as not to be noticed. She wanted to be ‘normal’. When she reads it now, she is filled with shame and sadness for the girl she was, the girl who denied herself just to connect.
Out of the cramp is a very educational, attractively designed series of ‘racism for beginners’ that lists the basic knowledge almost like a YouTube tutorial. You should show it in all schools. But the series is especially moving when Duysker examines himself. She started the series fresh, with the optimistic goal of moving the conversation about racism forward. In the first episode she says that she herself has not suffered much from racism. She returns from that in the second episode.
She also reads the blog at the kitchen table at her father’s home, surrounded by her sisters. The family comes from Amsterdam but has moved to the West Frisian Bovenkarspel. Her father had never really thought about what growing up in a white village meant for his daughters. He had also never commented on the blog. It was her personal quest, he thought. Sosha’s older sister, drama writer Esther Duysker, believes that the father should have done that, to better protect his three daughters. In the final part, next week, Sosha says that she started the series to “get humanity out of the cramp” but that it has become more of a personal quest. That is an enrichment.
Wilfred Takken and Amber Wiznitzer have been appointed permanent TV critics NRC. They already temporarily filled in for Rinskje Koelewijn and will from now on provide the Zap section every other week.
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