Behold the PSAs of PTSD

[rachelmanija]

My YA Agony Awards inspired a showdown of traumatizing PSAs -- with links to the actual PSAs on youtube!

ETA: Oops, now down to the quarterfinals.

The UK does some damn horrifying PSAs. Like Donald Pleasance gloating over death by water. And the sentence "The last sound Jenny ever heard was her own neck snapping." And the profoundly disturbing Amnesty International commercial. And the zombie child. And the bombing raid on the Smurf village. I gather that some of these air before movies over there, so there is no escape.

When I was in high school in the 80s in California, the entire school was forced to watch WWII-era videos of venereal diseases, including gonorrhea sores and a man whose chest wall had been eaten away by syphilis, so that you could see his skin balloon in and out when he breathed. I think some kids fainted.

After that, we had to watch a presentation by some conservative group that said, "Yes, condoms are ninety percent effective, but that means that out of every hundred of you who use them, ten of you will get AIDS and DIE." I sat there thinking, "This is going to be the next bio class lesson in 'lying with statistics--'" a pet peeve of my excellent bio teacher.

Then they used duct tape as a metaphor for sex, and said that if we had sex before marriage our tape would be all ripped and dirty and no one would want it.

That was also the decade of the "brain on drugs" commercials: "This is your brain." Egg. "This is your brain on drugs." Egg sizzles in frying pan. In a voice which promised that all questioners would be taken out and shot: "Any questions?!!"

What public service announcements terrorized you, as children or adults? How many of you are old enough to have been subjected to "in case of nuclear war, cower under your flimsy desk" drills?

Comments

[telophase.livejournal.com]

We didn't get any anti-sex or safe-sex messages, as we were vaguely in the south end of the Bible Belt and the bare MENTION of sex in school would cause us impressionable kids to throw off all our clothing and engage in orgies in the gym. Or something.

Not that we didn't have plenty of traumatizing moments. I was in the advanced biology class in 9th grade, and one day we got separated into the boys and the girls and watched the Nova show on human reproduction, which included film of a woman giving birth. That was far more effective than any other anti-sex or safe-sex message could have been, however, as all of us girls walked out of the classroom going I AM NEVER GOING TO HAVE A BABY OR SEX EVER EVER EVER EVER. And I was in a health class where the teacher - who was also the girls' volleyball coach - did what I can only describe as interpretive dance to illustrate the sentence "The uterus sloughs its lining every month." And she repeated it 2 or 3 times to drive the point home. I REMEMBER IT VIVIDLY TO THIS DAY, IT WAS THAT TRAUMATIZING.

We had duck-and-cover drills, but as we were in Tornado Alley, they were actually useful, to minimize injuries caused by flying glass and such if a tornado were to hit the school. :D

The one PSA we were shown in school that made an impact on me was a fire-safety one. It had a family in a two-story home that had a fire and because they had a fire safety plan in place, they all survived. Naturally, that wasn't the part that affected me. The makers of the film knew the propensity of kids to go "Cool!" and imitate anything dangerous they saw in PSAa, and therefore showed a fire starting in a completely impossible way: one of the kids, when they finished playing an electronic game of some sort, unplugged the cord and threw it into a cardboard box, where the contact of the metal prongs on the unplugged plug to the cardboard caused a fire to start.

TO THIS DAY I CANNOT STAND THE PRONGS OF A PLUG TOUCHING ANYTHING FLAMMABLE EVEN THOUGH I KNOW IT'S COMPLETE BOLLOCKS.

[keelieinblack.livejournal.com]

That was far more effective than any other anti-sex or safe-sex message could have been, however, as all of us girls walked out of the classroom going I AM NEVER GOING TO HAVE A BABY OR SEX EVER EVER EVER EVER.

Oh thank god I'm not the only person who had that exact same experience (and reaction).

I mean, of course you know how babies are born at that age, but that still doesn't mean you need to see it graphically and bloodily depicted--especially not when bio class is at 7 a.m. Eurgh.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

We had Bio RIGHT AFTER LUNCH

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

I could only wish I'd seen a birth video in high school, back when I able to ignore my own vagina except when it was dribbling blood.

I saw my first birth video in college (artsy film for a flim class), when I had a much better first-hand sense of my vagina and its various uses, and god, that was...when will they invent the uterine replicator, already?

[majinkarp.livejournal.com]

I remember the birth one! Our bio teacher thought he was being clever when he started rewinding the tape at that point, asking us, "Do you want to see it go back in?"

I always loved the ballerina and the runner anti-drug, with the voiceover that goes, "No one ever says, 'I want to be a junkie when I grow up.' I can't tell you how many of us went around telling our parents that that's precisely what we wanted to be when we got older.

I'm also amused by the newer ones that intone things like, "Tell your grandmother you couldn't visit her because you were stoned," "Tell your mom you lost your sister because you were high," etc. They're just laughably bad with the guilt-tripping.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I am going to insist that you recreate the interpretive uterine lining dance for me the next time we meet.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I will, only because I can't adequately describe it verbally. It's only one or two steps, but it's quite memorable.

But you have to do the dance with me.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Well, you already know I have no shame.