Tags: health/medicine, psychology/social psychology, depression, higher education, mental health, stigma, 21 to 60 mins
Year: 2012 
Length: 25:26
Access: YouTube

Summary: As stated on the University of Michigan Depression Center's website: "Created to promote awareness about depression on the college campus, [The View From Here] features students from differing identity groups, ages, and degree programs telling of their experiences with the disease. It also features faculty and staff who have worked with depressed students, and faculty and staff who have suffered from depression themselves." Specifically, the documentary draws attention to the complexity of depression, as many people—including those who suffer from it—are unaware of the symptoms and prevalence of depression. Part of the complexity relates to the numerous symptoms that are associated with the condition, which range from anxiety, anger, feelings of emptiness, substance abuse, reckless behavior, suicidal thoughts, loss of appetite, and panic, among many others. Because of this, depression can often go undiagnosed. The video would be useful to feature in a class on the sociology of mental health, as it offers many points of entry for discussing the various social factors that influence mental health. In addition to social triggers, the video also discusses treatment, which can include social and non-social forms of treatment such as counseling, spiritual treatments, and medication. 

Submitted By: AuntJessica

Tags: capitalism, commodification, consumption/consumerism, corporations, health/medicine, marketing/brands, pharmaceutical industry, prescription drugs, 21 to 60 mins
Year: 2007
Length: 49:23
Access: YouTube (trailer)

Summary: The filmmakers of this documentary argue that "missing in the health care debate is how drug companies are putting your and your family's safety at risk in order to make more money." Money Talks: Profits Before Patient Safety exposes the questionable tactics that big drug companies use to make record profits by playing with the safety of our health care. Using misleading advertising, attractive "drug reps" who wine and dine doctors, and other unethical practices, the drug industry makes billions of dollars every year selling us unsafe, unnecessary, and overpriced drugs. The film gives an in-depth, academic perspective on the questionable marketing tactics of the pharmaceutical industry, and features the commentary of investigative journalists, former pharmaceutical sales representatives, and medical professionals including Dr. John Abramson, author of Overdo$ed America, and Alex Sugerman-Brozan, director of the Prescription Access Litigation Project. Other notable interviewees include Dr. Bob Goodman of Columbia University, founder of the "No Free Lunch" program, and Dr. Jerome Hoffman of UCLA Medical School. Money Talks: Profits Before Patient Safety was chosen by the American Library Association as one of the most notable films for adults in 2008.

Submitted By: Holly Mosher 

Tags: bodies, health/medicine, media, prejudice/discrimination, fat shaming, obesity, 00 to 05 mins
Year: 2012
Length: 2:04
Access: msnbc

Summary: This video is from the Today Show and can be used to highlight the very real health concerns associated with obesity, a problem which stems in part from living in a society that encourages people to move less and eat more. According to the news report, Alabama, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, and West Virginia are the "fattest" states, while Colorado, Massachusetts, and Vermont are the leanest. While there is a tendency for people to conclude the issue boils down to personal choices, this report draws attention to a more systemic reason for obesity. The lowest rates of obesity tend to occur in the wealthiest states, suggesting that leaner states are able to encourage exercise by building more pedestrian friendly infrastructure. Class discussion can also be pushed beyond the explicit message of the report, and students can be encouraged to critically examine the discourse on obesity in the United States. Much like this news report, people often connect weight and health, but it is simply not the case that being overweight is the same as being unhealthy. Similarly, students can also be encouraged to examine the phenomenon of fat shaming and how the widespread practice of photographing overweight bodies without heads (a.k.a., "headless fatties") reinforces the message that having an overweight body is so shameful, identities need to be disguised.

Submitted By: Vicky Herbel, Associate Professor of Sociology

Tags: abortion/reproduction, aging/life course, biology, bodies, gender, health/medicine, lgbtq, marriage/family, science/technology, sex/sexuality, social construction, fatherhood, motherhood, parenting, pregnancy, stigma, transgender, subtitles/CC, 06 to 10 mins
Year: 2012
Length: 10:33
Access: Vimeo

Summary: This video portrays the experiences and voices of various transgender parents and their families, which includes their decisions to become parents, reflections on what it means to be a parent, experiences of being a child of a transgender parent, the social stigma attached to being a transgender parent (and transgenderism in general), and experiences with various reproductive technology options. The video is excellent for illustrating the diversity of family structures and alternative gender arrangements, and would be useful in a class on sociology of the family, reproduction, gender, or sex and sexuality. People in the video highlight the hyper-gendered experience of pregnancy and parenting, thereby illustrating the social construction of these core features of the life course; this social constructivist perspective stands in contrast to common biological understandings of pregnancy and parenting. This video would pair well with Laura Mamo's Queering Reproduction: Achieving Pregnancy in the Age of Technoscience, as well as with GLAD's recently released book, Transgender Family Law: A Guide to Effective Advocacy, which can offer a nice framework for discussing some of the legal issues and advocacy strategies that transgender people encounter in a family law context. The video is also available with Spanish subtitles.

Submitted By: Valerie Chepp

Image by Kristian Dowling/Getty Images for Beatie

Tags: gender, health/medicine, organizations/occupations/work, social mvmts/social change/resistance, nursing, occupational sex segregation, pink collar, sexism, 00 to 05 mins
Year: 2012
Length: 3:13
Access: New York Times

Summary: When we first meet someone, the process of getting to know them usually entails finding out their occupation. We seek this information because occupations are an integral part of our identities. Furthermore, our worker self cannot easily be separated from our gender identity, as many jobs (and therefore the people that do them) are considered masculine or feminine—with the latter often denoted by the term “pink collar.” For example in the movie "Meet the Parents," when the protagonist Gaylord Focker is introduced to his future in-laws, they repeatedly undermine his masculine identity because he works in nursing, a “pink collar” and female-dominated occupation (see a short clip from the movie here). However, according to this New York Times investigation, changes in the economy are altering our culture. In our shift to a postindustrial economy, traditionally masculine blue-collar jobs are disappearing; thus many men are choosing to enter fields that were previously dominated by women. This clip is useful for instructors who seek to explore the articulation between gender and work, and how economic changes to the labor market are provoking cultural understandings pertaining to gender.

Submitted By: Jason T. Eastman

_Tags: bodies, consumption/consumerism, gender, health/medicine, knowledge, political economy, biopolitics, feminism, medicalization, menarche, menstruation, menses, patriarchy, stigma, taboo, 00 to 05 mins
Year: 2007
Length: 3:57
Access: YouTube

Summary: In this scene from the movie Superbad, Seth finds himself dancing close to a woman at a party and winds up with her menstrual blood on his pant leg. A group of boys at the party spot the blood and deduce the source, and thus begins one of the film's signature gags: an awkward adolescent deals with what is supposed to be an awkward adolescent moment. In addition to Seth's panicked yet futile attempts to stave off humiliation are his efforts to work through the disgust of this unambiguous contamination. "Someone period-ed on my fucking leg!" he cries while gagging. Feminists have long been critical of this all-too-common fear of menstrual contamination and point to its roots in patriarchy. It is an instance of re-imagining the natural human experience of menstruation as a pathology, which can only be experienced with a measure of shame and dread. But more than men simply pathologizing a distinctly feminine experience, the pervasive fear of menstruation also fuels a multibillion dollar industry, which produces and markets hundreds of products designed to manage and even suppress menstruation (e.g., Lybrel and Seasonique). In an interview (here) about her recent book, New Blood: Third Wave Feminism and the Politics of Menstruation, sociologist Chris Bobel nicely articulates the connection between menstrual anxiety and corporate profit: "The prohibition against talking about menstruation—shh…that’s dirty; that’s gross; pretend it’s not going on; just clean it up—breeds a climate where corporations, like femcare companies and pharmaceutical companies, like the makers of Lybrel and Seasonique, can develop and market products of questionable safety. They can conveniently exploit women’s body shame and self-hatred. And we see this, by the way, when it comes to birthing, breastfeeding, birth control and health care in general. The medical industrial complex depends on our ignorance and discomfort with our bodies." The clip would work nicely with Bobel's book and as a means of opening a discussion about biopolitics, and specifically, the intensity with which women's bodies are scrutinized and managed by both the state and economy.

I would like to thank Aimee Koon for suggesting this clip.

Submitted By: Lester Andrist

Tags: biology, health/medicine, inequality, knowledge, prejudice/discrimination, race/ethnicity, science/technology, social construction, theory, fallacy of reification, racial formation, racial project, scientific racism, slave hypothesis, 00 to 05 mins
Year: 2011
Length: 2:36
Access: YouTube

Summary: When discussing racial inequality in my introductory sociology course I make it a point to cover Omi and Winant's notion of a racial formation as resulting from historically situated racial projects wherein "racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed" (p. 55-56). These projects take multiple forms but in at least one version, there is an attempt to collapse race—a socially constructed concept—into biology. Such projects are similar insofar as they suggest that the socially constructed distinctiveness between people of different racial categories roughly approximates a meaningful biological distinctiveness. Scientists have been centrally involved in this effort to "find" a biological basis for race. Thus in the middle of the 19th century Dr. Samuel Morton attempted to establish that on average cranial capacities of different races were measurably different. While the cranium is no longer scrutinized in this way, the search for a biological, and therefore "natural," basis for race continues. In 1988 Dr. Clarence Grim put forth what is now known as the "slave hypothesis," which is the idea that the enslaved people who survived the Middle Passage were more likely to be carriers of a gene that allowed them to retain salt. Grim argued that this ability to retain salt, while necessary for surviving the harsh conditions on slave ships, is now proving to be the leading cause for higher rates of hypertension among African Americans. This theory has been soundly refuted but apparently still remains in many hypertension textbooks, and in 2007, the medical celebrity, Dr. Oz, promoted the idea to an audience of about 8 million people on the Oprah Winfrey Show. The clip above is from January of this year and is yet another instance of him promoting the theory. Coupled with the recent introduction of BiDil as an FDA approved treatment of heart failure for African Americans, sociologists have taken note of this slipperiest of slides down the slope of "deploying racial categories as if they were immutable in nature and society" (see Troy Duster's article in Science). The clip offers an excellent opportunity for students to discuss the persistence of this racial project, the involvement of science in this project, and how these ideological articulations might serve to provide a justification for continued inequality.

Submitted By: Lester Andrist