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Costing an Arm and a Leg
The victims of a growing mental disorder are obsessed with amputation.
By Carl Elliott
Baz remembers first seeing an amputee when he was a 4-year old boy in Liverpool. By the time he was 7 he had begun to think, "This is the way I should be." It was not until Baz was in his 50s, however, that he actually had his leg amputated. Baz froze his leg in dry ice until it was irreversibly damaged, then persuaded a surgeon to complete the job. When he awoke from the anesthetic and his left leg was gone, he says, "All my torment had disappeared."
Whole, a riveting new documentary by Melody Gilbert that recently premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival and will soon be shown at festivals in Calgary and London, is about an increasingly visible group of people who call themselves "amputee wannabes." Wannabes desperately wish to have their healthy limbs removed, and some have succeeded in having it done. Kevin, a university lecturer and one of several wannabes featured in the film, had his leg amputated by Robert Smith, a surgeon in Scotland who has amputated the legs of two otherwise healthy people. George Boyer shot his own leg off with a shotgun. Others have used chain saws and homemade guillotines. Why? Nobody really knows, including the wannabes themselves, who often say they have had the desire since they were children. "It's obviously peculiar," admits Kevin. "But knowing it is peculiar and saying it is weird does not do away with the problem."
[...]
Gilbert's sensitive film allows wannabes to speak for themselves. Many are so articulate and likable that no matter how difficult you find it to understand their desire, you will come away from the film with sympathy for their strange predicament. Yet perhaps the most disturbing figures in Whole are the clinicians. Even as the wannabes admit how baffling they find their own desires, the mental health professionals in the film speak with absolute confidence. The film features a social worker and clinical psychologist who have counseled Boyer in Florida, as well as Michael First, an academic psychiatrist at Columbia University, who has organized several meetings of wannabes and clinicians in New York. First says that the purpose of these meetings is to "facilitate treatment" for the condition, by which he says he means surgical treatment. His apparent certainty that nothing short of amputation can help these people is underscored by ominous music and a screen shot that reads, "There are no medications or therapies known to help wannabes."
This claim is not so much false as incomplete. No formal research studies on treatments for wannabes have ever been undertaken. In fact, nobody really knows much about this condition. Only a handful of articles about it have been published, most of them small case studies in obscure medical journals. You might think that clinicians would want to be certain that all options had been exhausted before recommending that patients have their arms or legs amputated, yet the clinicians in the film do not mention alternative treatments. The only person who expresses a hint of uncertainty is Robert Smith (the Scottish surgeon mentioned above); he wonders how the amputations he has performed will be perceived in 20 years.
Dissenting voices of any kind are largely absent from Whole. In her eagerness to document the extraordinary stories her subjects tell (and perhaps to gain their trust), Gilbert has produced a film that uncritically accepts those stories at face value. The patients explain what this condition is and how it should be treated, and the clinicians obediently nod their agreement. The only skeptical voice in the film comes from Jenny, the wife of an American wannabe living in France. When Jenny decides she cannot stay married to a man who wants to cut his own leg off, her husband accuses her of being narrow-minded.
[...]
[ From Slate - Carl Elliott is an interesting chap, you may want to check out this interview too, if you are interested about identity and technology.
SPECS:
~401Mb, 00:57:38
video: 320x240, 29.97 fps (pure NTSC), XVID4, 821,5 kbps
sound: MP3, 128kbps, Stereo
THE LINK:
Whole (Melody Gilbert 2003 - documentary).avi 
CAPS:
Thanks, this'll be fun.
pero nada de la pelicula.